here's a funny (and surprisingly relevant) example of why entity resolution is hard. in this article about local celebrities and their ranks on google, the author is attempting to point out that there are lots of folks with similar names. the irony of course, is that one of the examples (well, two actually) is me.
we finally got the order out for the new hardware for the genomics institute high performance computing facility upgrade. i can't wait for the new equipment to arrive.
as previously posted, we're currently using gfs to power our 8TB file system. this system however is under tremendous strain. traversing the file system, to do a full backup for exmample, takes over five days. and the slow down really is in the directory traversal, our tape drives are only writing data at a quarter of their capacity. enter gpfs.