A few months ago Brian Beach, a Distinguished Engineer at cloud backup joint Backblaze, published a set of study-like blog postings relating their experiences with hard drive lifespan in their 25,000 plus spindle environment.

The blogs garnered quite a bit of interest due to the subject matter, and provocative titles like: “How Long Do Hard Drives Last?” “Enterprise Drives: Fact or Fiction?” and “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?” The blogs raise interesting questions and put forward controversial conclusions.

One of most contentious claims came from the first blog (Simon Sharwood covers it here) in which Beach asserts that consumer-grade hard drives are actually more reliable than their supposedly industrial strength (and definitely more pricey) enterprise cousins. According to their research, enterprise drives failed at an annual rate of 4.6% vs. 4.2% for the consumer versions.

The bottom line, according to Beach, is that consumer drives are a better choice (even after factoring in the longer enterprise warranty) due to their higher reliability and lower cost.

Have you ever wanted to lay a bet down on the Las Vegas sports books? Or take a bundle of money from the suckers in your office Final Four betting pool? Is it possible to win sports bets consistently over the long haul?

According to the guys at PredictionMachine.com, the answer is yes. Their secret weapon? Numbers, baby – it’s all in the numbers. They’ve built a formidable prediction tool with their Predictalator, the name they’ve given their methodology and algorithms.

Over the last three years, the Predictalator has scored wins on better than 70% of their straight-up bets, and better than 50% vs. the Vegas spread. This is a combined record on all of the professional and college football, basketball, pro hockey, and Major League Baseball games they’ve picked over the last three years.

What’s interesting about their approach is that they aren’t looking at historical trends and trying to quantify their hunches. They’re taking a highly scientific and quantitative approach with sophisticated models and lots of simulations. In fact, their tool simulates each and every game 50,000 times before making a pick.

My pal Rich Brueckner and I had a chance to interview PredictionMachine.com founder Paul Bessire as part of our Radio Free HPC podcast a few weeks ago. In the program, Paul discusses the genesis of the Predictalator and how he turned his master’s degree in quantitative analysis into a full-time business.

Does your performance in the data center suffer because you don’t have enough memory to really get the job done? Do you have apps that don’t perform well on clusters, or don’t parallelize at all? If this describes you or a loved one, read on, because Cray thinks they have the solution to what ails you.

Cray, with partner ScaleMP, recently announced two new systems that aim to cure your memory woes, in distinctly different ways.

And so it begins: our coverage of the ISC’13 Student Cluster Challenge. It’s time to meet the three European teams, the two American teams, the squads from China, the students from South Africa, and the “Rainforest Eagles 2.0″ of Costa Rica. As…

Are you sick of brainless, insipid, hackneyed, and utterly stupid TV shows? (I’m not, but some of you might be.) If you are, then direct your eyes and DVRs to a new show on Discovery Channel called The Big Brain Theory. The premise of the show sounds like typical reality fare: a set of contestants are competing to win a job in some organization. But this show isn’t typical at all – it is, in a word, amazing.

Contestants on The Big Brain Theory have to use real science to tackle truly difficult tasks. In last week’s premiere episode, teams watched a demonstration in which two small pickup trucks were crashed head-on at 35 mph. In the bed of each truck was a wooden box that exploded in the collision. The host explained that the crash generated 40g of force on the 160lb package, which was rigged to explode if subjected to 25g or more. The task: design a mechanism that will ensure that the package experiences less than 25g in an identical crash.

First up: this podcast. The Radio Free HPC team discusses Lustre and LUG 2013 with Brent Gorda. Now part of Intel in their High Performance Data Division, Gorda was CEO of Whamcloud when the company was acquired last summer. Gorda…