Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Giant Hurricane on Saturn, here's one in New Orleans)

• 1,966,080 cores: Time Warp synchronization protocol using up to 7.8M MPI tasks on 1,966,080 cores of the {Sequoia} Blue Gene/Q supercomputer system. 33 trillion events processed in 65 seconds yielding a peak event-rate in excess of 504 billion events/second using 120 racks of Sequoia.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • Thad Starner: the longer accessing a device exceeds 2s, the more its actually usage would decrease exponentially. Thus, he made a claim that wrist watch interface always sitting on one's wrist ready to use should be more successful than mobile phones which have to pulled out of the pocket. 
  • @joedevon: We came for scalability but we stayed for agility #NoSQL
  • @jahmailay: "Our user base is exploding. I really wish we spent more time on scalability instead of features customers don't use." - Everybody, always.
  • @bsletten: I don’t think it is a coincidence that the words eval() and evil are so close.
  • @RCSecure: Maybe Gov should stop deploying crappy #CyberSecurity instead of Surveiling Citizens
  • @davidpav: "This is what Netflix does - after each deployment creates AMI for faster scaling up"
  • @franzgranlund: Rewrote my little batch-processing application using #akka . 20% performance increase just like that - and now it is easier to scale.
  • @marshray: Ouch, that's kind of dismal. Perhaps we need a new term: "eventual scalability"
  • @adrianco: RT @rbranson: @cscotta load average is the worst thing ever. Slowly trying to evangelize it's demise as a reasonable metric. < +1 every 15 m


• MIT Tech Review picks 10 breakthrough technologies: Smart Watches (really?), Memory implants (deciphering the code by which the brain forms long-term memories), Additive manufacturing (3-D printing), Supergrids (finally says Edison, DC powergrids), Temporary social media (sigh), Prenatal DNA sequencing (great for full lifecycle ad targeting), Baxter (compliant robots), Deep Learning (the singularity is near), Ultra-Efficient Solar Power (now we are talking). Prediction: We'll laugh at all this filter control talk once we have all of Google's datacenters and knowledge graph software implanted in our heads.


• IBM on making movies using atoms as pixels. Characterization was a little thin but the plot was magnetic.


• Lesson from Airbnb: Give yourself permission to experiment with non-scalable changes. Building better is better than building bigger.


• Here's a short review by me on CyberStorm by Matthew Mather. Matthew is also the author of the most excellent Atopia Chronicles, a sprawling exploration of "artificial intelligence, distributed computing, nanotechnology, and the full range of humanity." CyberStorm is a chilling blow by blow of what could happen in a real cyber attack. As a programmer it's the implied idea of a kind of Crises OS built on a mesh of smartphones that I found most fascinating. Not much seems to be done in this area and even the how-to of writing such applications is rarely discussed. Could be interesting.

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