New blog alert!
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
by Oxide Product Assurance Engineer Steve Karam
What is a Compute Sled? FAQ Friday #61
How is Oxide different from hyperscaler infrastructure? FAQ Friday #51
When you’re building distributed systems from the ground up, every layer is a place where you can make the network faster. But every slowdown is a problem you own.
Steve Karam just pushed his first (of many) Oxide blogs on tuning network performance across an Oxide system: jumbo frames at the edge (324% external throughput), CPU placement, flow parallelism, and IPv6 inside and out.
Performance is like an ~~onion~~ parfait. It has layers.
Congrats to DR @Hello_KayT for getting the fuck out of UW with her PhD and morals intact. Better than can be said for almost everyone else.
Is Oxide hardware made by Super Micro (or any other OEM/ODM)? FAQ Friday #40
My diploma from UW arrived today. In a final fuck you from the school, the bottom corner is folded. It really encapsulates my whole experience there. Can't decide if I should frame it or burn it.
Vickie would, in fact, steal a car. She has committed herself to a life of piracy since her eye ulcer ruptured, and she had to get her eye removed. She's doing great though and has been menacing me and Void * by running into us at ramming speed with her cone. Watch out on the seven seas for this deadly cutie.
Since it's #worldbeeday, let me suggest reading @Hello_KayT's recent paper on Beehive, a flexible networking stack for direct-attached FPGA accelerators:
On my way to HotOS! A little anxious because it’s the first conference that I’ve attended since the UW situation blew up at OSDI and half the UW systems faculty will be there but looking forward to seeing everyone and super excited to hear the talks.
This is me. Probably clear from some of the details in there. I wrote this in one morning after getting tired of all the ass covering and one-sided statements where the department gets to put out whatever narrative it wants at the expense of others. Irene, in this case.
I'm just getting used to being able to offer up more details. Up until January when the investigation ended, it was about 9 months of being strongly advised to not say anything, even within the department.
This was not the first time I was asked not to speak publicly about lab issues.
I reference another go-around with the department in trying to get systemic problems in a different lab addressed in my second year. It was a much more "routine set" of problems (MIA advisors, bad advising, unrealistic expectations, ect.) in that case. Again, we were asked not to speak about it public because the department was working with us in good faith.
A perspective from one of the UW women. I’ve linked it in my blog post. https://irenezhang.net/uw-women-statement.txt
I sure am glad that UW is so committed to maintaining the anonymity of people in their recent HR investigation report that they did not identify the Principal Researcher in the systems group at Microsoft Research who is an affiliate faculty member and is married to another Principal Researcher in the same group who is a lab alumna and former affiliate faculty member, and also runs the social media platform at https://discuss.systems/about/ and is named Dan.
Awful but sadly not unexpected.
You can tell how sloppy and vindictive this is by the fact that it includes a joke on discuss.systems, including my full, unredacted name and handle for an “anonymized report”.
I don’t even go to school here! I’m not even supposed to be here today!
https://discuss.systems/@irene/113941249795492715
Today I opened a thesis template and started putting text into it. Stay tuned to see if I can escape UW CSE before they make another horrific public blunder that probably violates my rights.
Wow, the UW systems and networking lab is literally in the middle of an HR investigation into harassment, and the faculty are back to business as usual with lab events WITH NO CHANGES. No code of conduct, no sexual harassment training, NOTHING. They’ve locked the women in a lab and continue to not provide a safe environment for them to learn or work. Meanwhile, the women are spending hours talking to investigators about emotional and painful memories (and documented incidents), while trying to get their research done and take classes. I’m speechless and deeply ashamed of my old lab.
Guess I'm done working for the day?
Misogyny is among the biggest issues facing our community. Dr. @irene Zhang of Microsoft Research recently posted a personal blog sharing her experience through the lens of moral philosophy. This has been reposted by both SIGOPS and now our own SIGARCH blog. We encourage all of our community to read and reflect on this blog and to also contribute your own experiences to the GitHub repository. Dr. Zhang also shares a number of resources for allies to educate themselves and improve our community by reducing instances of sexism and harassment.
I wrote a blog post about what it is like being #womenintech within the framework of #moralphilosophy and ethics. #consistencyforthewin https://irenezhang.net/blog/2024/07/24/misogyny.html