bend4r

The article features the game "Findus 4". The CD copy protection was causing problems even when the game was sold back then. As a result, the publisher itself published a patch to remove the copy protection to make it compatible with Windows versions > NT5.0. The patch is still available in the Internet Archive. The diff between the originally shipped binary on the CD and the officially patched version from the publisher might be beneficial for further reverse engineering though.

I bought the first Ciro board back then in 1998 at a German department store called Karstadt. They took the boards into their stock as a small "test balloon", to see if the idea of small boards with roller blade wheel is accepted by the customers.

Hell it was fun riding with the board. Now, in 2021 spare parts are still available and I took the chance to refurbish the board for my child. The aluminum parts are very durable.

Unfortunately, the boards are almost forgotten but still used by a faithful circle of enthusiasts who are enjoying the unique driving feeling and the durable construction details.

Before K2 Kickboards and Micro Mobility Scooters emerged in Europe in the dot-com-bubble 1999, there were Ciro Boards in Germany. The Ciro Boards are still around and are an insiders' tip for mobility enthusiasts.

Modern HPC schedulers like Slurm are able to run containerized workloads making the problem of portability less painful.

For batch workload K8s is not sufficient. You need a workflow engine on top like Kubeflow or Airflow, so run you jobs. Thus. consider K8s more as a cluster operating software, but not as a fully-enabled workload management like slurm.

Furthermore, K8s has so many features you do not need in HPC environments, where high throughput and load occupation is paramount.

fully agree with the comment. Currently running an >500 node bare metal cluster with GPU nodes in K8s using Mellanox NICs with 80Gbit/s connectivity.

Customer is scheduling work load with Airflow on the K8s farm. Coming from a HPC background, I can confirm your comment. For batch-like workload, K8s and Airflow is a bad choice regarding farm utilization and workload placement. Classic HPC schedulers like Slurm are way more efficient on using farm resources for this kind of workload.

Also networking wise is Calico for high speed Infiniband-based networks might be a bad decision. Control plane is too chatty, and slows down spinning up workload. Also do not ever try IP-on-IP encapsulation - it will make your NIC-speed slow, due to CPU-bound encapsulation.

With Mellanox-class NICS, strive for SDN technology or use network transport modes with hardware acceleration on the NIC, like VLAN-tagging.