I saw that my credit card was charge for a Stage 1 last Tuesday, January 13th. I haven't received a Stage 1 or even a shipping confirmation. I was under the understanding that the units would be shipped 2-3 days after cards were charged.

I E-mailed Maurice last week (Friday) and still not even a reply. I just want to know what's going on...

Don't worry. You'll get it. I'm recieving mine today.

I exchanged e-mails with them last night and was told the next batch is going out next week. If the delay was due to the switches, I'll be happy to wait and have the on/off option.

I was also charged the 13th but they probably did a whole group at once thinking they were indeed going out sooner.

Well I'd just like to be contacted with updates, rather than be left guessing.

They are really busy.

You'll probably get an e-mail from Rachel when the unit ships. I paid via paypall back in december.. so I had money out of pocket for a month..

I know how you feel.

But there's nothing to worry about.

They have a phone # if you are that concerned!

relax.... you should see the Fedex man soon....

Last ones charged go out on monday. Then on to the next batch.

sweet! Can't wait!

Very cool! :cool: My Visa was hit on the 13th too.

I'm off to stand by the front door and wait for FedEx.

-Dave

I'm feeling a little better now.

Not to worry, remember members were all in an uproar when they didn't know when the units were being shipped until Muarice started shipping. Remember he had 700 initial orders so yours will get there very soon.

Actually the delays could be seen as "funny" (if you weren't worried about your hard earned cash). First the switch supplier fiasco. Then we "lost" a few units in our shop (hiding in unmarked boxes). Then we had a flu outbreak. Talk about Murphy's law!

Just finished the last ones. On to the next batch next week!

Originally posted by XK4
I'm off to stand by the front door and wait for FedEx.

-Dave

I wasn't home, and FedEx left this $500 nugget on my front porch. Thank God it wasn't stolen.

Crap!

Sorry about that.
We have had so many hassles lately with Fedex Ground that we are now shipping all orders by Fedex Air Express.

This last 10 days have been a comedy of stupid things.
Swiches were supposed to be here, but supplier screwed us around.

A bunch of premade wiring bits coming from Hong Kong were supposed to arrive but supplier buggered off for Chinese New Year before shipping.

I revamped the install manual, and managed to get it posted to the forums, but did not have enough time to print and include with some units as I had to go to Salt Lake City for the week.

Back now, sanity recovering..

Anyway, to those who we owe a reply, I am sorry we missed you.
If you email me I will confirm the order for you and ETA for shipping.

Thanks for your patience..

Originally posted by canzoomer
Crap!


We have had so many hassles lately with Fedex Ground that we are now shipping all orders by Fedex Air Express.



Fedex Air Express = gratification over night, at least in my case. And Maurice & Rachael are very conscientious, so don't worry. Any problems will be resolved pretty quick now.

As I mentioned, spent the last week in Utah.
Installed a computer cluster for U of Utah, Centre for High Performance Computing.
After much work, here is a pic with our customers standing in front of the completed installation.

http://www.rx8club.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9821&stc=1&d=1198187785
256 dual Opteron CPU blade servers,
512 Opteron 246 CPUs
2 terrabytes of RAM.
Over 2.5km of fibre Myrinet network.
1.1km of ethernet
It should show up soon on the Top500 list as about #55 or so.
http://www.top500.org/

Last ones I installed on the most recent list:
http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/

See # 132, # 140 and #206

Congratulations and great picture, but without your car we don't know which one is you. (My guess, proud guy second from left.)

Originally posted by shebam
Congratulations and great picture, but without your car we don't know which one is you. (My guess, proud guy second from left.) Wrong, guess again.. ;)

Check out all that fiber!! Sadly all racks don't look like that!

Gotta be exuberant guy on far left then. Must have brought his sweater from up north.

Originally posted by shebam
Congratulations and great picture, but without your car we don't know which one is you. (My guess, proud guy second from left.)

I am not in the picture.

I am the guy holding the camera.

Pictures of me tend to come out a bit less attractive.
For example in this shot where I am expressing to Rachael my feelings about doing paperwork:

Canzoomer, I was giving shebam a trick question, you blew it for me. ;)

Here is a pic of one of my partners (Michal Jaegermann) at the start of the fibre install.

Sorry Voodoo!

Here's a picture with Michal being eaten by the fibre runs he is hooking up.
http://www.rx8club.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9833&stc=1&d=1198188382
I call this one:
"Which sauce? Marinara or cheese?"

BTW, this setup, while running full out, will do about 2.3 terraflops (2.3 trillion floating point operations per second)

The cluster is a collaborative resource for the University of Utah, faculties of Science.
It is housed in the "Utah State Poison Control Centre, Uof Utah Campus Research Park, Building 585, a Green Hornet Space Agency Project."

This is why you all need lawyers on occasion -- caption was,
"a pic with our customers standing in front of the completed installation." To avoid ambiguity, better to say "a pic OF our customers ...." (WHAT or WHOM "with" our customers?) Fortunately, Maurice's engineering and entrepreneurial talents depend on other sorts of precision. I do claim triumph in initially picking the guy with the beard, but he's not nearly so cool looking as Maurice. And, if the huge thing was turned on, impressive that a guy was wearing a sweater in the room!

Nope, it is turned off.
They do not have all their air conditioning installed yet, so when it runs they have to turn off a bunch of other gear in the room.

To do testing we had them rent some big fan units to push air around the room. It's a BIG room!

OK, so I am busted by the "grammar police".

The unit takes about 89KW of power, and requires 25 tons of refrigeration.

Electricity cost for running it and related cooling is about $120 per hour.

Looks like a nice setup, beautifully installed. Too bad it's not IBM equipment. :D

$120 and hr for cooling? Yikes! but wait that's 8,280,000,000,000,000.00 point operations. It may be worth it!(note: Legal Disclaimer, the above number might be wrong, writer can not be accountable for errors). Thanks, the writer.

So, just wondering what something like that cost?

About 1.9 million.

Originally posted by Omicron
Looks like a nice setup, beautifully installed. Too bad it's not IBM equipment. :D

IBM is nice, but then it would cost twice as much!

And I would not get a slice of it..

Originally posted by JimW
$120 and hr for cooling? Yikes! but wait that's 8,280,000,000,000,000.00 point operations. It may be worth it!(note: Legal Disclaimer, the above number might be wrong, writer can not be accountable for errors). Thanks, the writer.

$120 for power AND cooling.

You got the right number of zeros.
8,280,000,000,000,000 floating point ops, and about half as many integer ops. At the same time.

Let's say you used this and a good algorithm to crack encryption keys. With a 256bit key it would take about 3 minutes to brute force solve it.

Los Alamos just got a similar style setup in the fall, but with 4 times as many CPUs. Around 8 or 9TF

We are installing a cluster at the U of Toronto this spring that is 385 nodes, 770 CPUs at about 50% higher clock rate than the one we just did.
About 3.5 tflops.

They figure that by 2008 the bigger installations will be breaking a petaflop. That is one quadrillion ops per second.

Kind of humbling, isn't it?

Maurice hasn't publicly revealed this, but every Stage I unit is equipped with an 802.11gggggg wireless interface that ties our ECUs into the Utah installation and all his others. When the switch is thrown we will be the world's first mobile distributed computing network that can pull .91 G's. Will be used to break the Mazda ECU authentication and encryption, lowering the price of future work.

....talk about thread creep; really we're all just giddy to when our units will arrive.

......must be decimal floating point error on Utah's 101th CPU; check with NASA. They've had a similar flash memory error.

BTW: I think I heard that the memory chips for some of the cameras on the rovers are only like 128MB or 256MB; present day cameras have past this level already. Technology is cool - and fast.

Originally posted by canzoomer
IBM is nice, but then it would cost twice as much!

And I would not get a slice of it.. As you know, I was just giving you grief Maurice. :D

Originally posted by shebam
Maurice hasn't publicly revealed this, but every Stage I unit is equipped with an 802.11gggggg wireless interface that ties our ECUs into the Utah installation and all his others. When the switch is thrown we will be the world's first mobile distributed computing network that can pull .91 G's. Will be used to break the Mazda ECU authentication and encryption, lowering the price of future work. Actually, I think the PCM piggybacks do indeed have a wireless interface, all tied into one of Maurice's mainframes... from which....he will someday flip a switch..... and...
AND RULE THE WORLD!!!!!!!!HAHAHAHAHhahahahahahahhahahahahahahah ahahaha

We're on to you, Maurice. :D

Maurice, I thought you said that you had all this scaled down so it can fit into the stock ECU box? :)

Uh, yeah.
You are pullingmy leg right?

OK, here goes:
The unit weighs about 1.3 tons and comes with a small trailer which you pull behind the car.

Most of the contents of the box are for show. The only active component is a little chip about the size of your small fingernail.

It is powered by a small experimental fusion reactor, and the control codes actually come by wireless communications from our headquarters in a cave deep in the Rocky mountains.

If someone is good, then we reprogram your car to make lots of power.

If you are bad we turn it all off.

Say bad things and troll on forums?

No HP for you!

Maurice.....The Horse Power Nazi!

NO HORSE POWER FOR YOU!

S!

Originally posted by canzoomer
$120 for power AND cooling.

You got the right number of zeros.
8,280,000,000,000,000 floating point ops, and about half as many integer ops. At the same time.

Let's say you used this and a good algorithm to crack encryption keys. With a 256bit key it would take about 3 minutes to brute force solve it.

Los Alamos just got a similar style setup in the fall, but with 4 times as many CPUs. Around 8 or 9TF

We are installing a cluster at the U of Toronto this spring that is 385 nodes, 770 CPUs at about 50% higher clock rate than the one we just did.
About 3.5 tflops.

They figure that by 2008 the bigger installations will be breaking a petaflop. That is one quadrillion ops per second.

Kind of humbling, isn't it? Yes it is, what's next, the speed of thought? Wait a minute we can't possibly think that fast!

Originally posted by canzoomer
$120 for power AND cooling.

You got the right number of zeros.
8,280,000,000,000,000 floating point ops, and about half as many integer ops. At the same time.

Let's say you used this and a good algorithm to crack encryption keys. With a 256bit key it would take about 3 minutes to brute force solve it.

Los Alamos just got a similar style setup in the fall, but with 4 times as many CPUs. Around 8 or 9TF

We are installing a cluster at the U of Toronto this spring that is 385 nodes, 770 CPUs at about 50% higher clock rate than the one we just did.
About 3.5 tflops.

They figure that by 2008 the bigger installations will be breaking a petaflop. That is one quadrillion ops per second.

Kind of humbling, isn't it?

Oki, 3 minutes for a 256bit key? Let's do the maths.

Normally you solve a 256bit key in 2^255 tries.
Assuming your computer does 10.000.000.000.000.000 keys per second (that is if you can try 1 key per 1 CPU operation, again not very likely as it is going to take a LOT more operations do check 1 key)

But again, lets assume you can check 1 key for every operation, that leads us to about 1.8 * 10^53 years crack one message.

Assuming your computer cluster is 1 million times faster than what you specified then it is still going to take 1.8 * 10^47 years to solve it. To put things into perspective; the universe is belived to be 11.5 * 10^9 years old.

/twospoons, just putting things into perspective :)

Originally posted by JimW
Yes it is, what's next, the speed of thought? Wait a minute we can't possibly think that fast!

The brain is still much quicker than any computer out there, but the gap is closing quickly.

/twospoons

Originally posted by canzoomer

Say bad things and troll on forums?

No HP for you!

i seem to remember a time when you would have almost had to turn the switch off on yourself, Maurice;) :p :D i for one am glad that cooler heads prevailed. now to just find $600 (or is it still $750)


Originally posted by twospoons


Oki, 3 minutes for a 256bit key? Let's do the maths.

you missed where he said " this and a good algorithm" .
:p

Originally posted by zoom44
i seem to remember a time when you would have almost had to turn the switch off on yourself, Maurice;) :p :D i for one am glad that cooler heads prevailed. now to just find $600 (or is it still $750)


:p

It is now officially $600 for one unit, and $500 for 10 and up.
Go ahead, do a group buy, make my day and save me paperwork!
Shipping is lots cheaper per unit too!

Over in the poll thread I became convinced that is the correct path.

Thanks!