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I worked for Myricom 2001->2013, and Google 2013->2015. And, wow, I wish I could comment on this thread.. :) EDIT: Scott's Medium blog post linked from thi
by drewg123 5y ago
I worked for Myricom 2001->2013, and Google 2013->2015. And, wow, I wish I could comment on this thread.. :)
EDIT: Scott's Medium blog post linked from this article is fascinating: https://medium.com/swlh/myricom-an-hpc-story-and-lessons-learned-from-the-fall-of-an-industry-darling-35017e6373d8 https://medium.com/swlh/myricom-an-hpc-story-and-lessons-lea...
- CalChris 5y agoI just want to know why it needs to be in-tree.
- wyldfire 5y agoGoogle uses upstream llvm as their dev repo. I don't know if they do any development downstream.
- IshKebab 5y agoLLVM doesn't have a plugin system so it's that, or maintain a fork and deal with horrible merges all the time.
- Fnoord 5y agoSome important/big customer pays a maintainer to maintain it upstream instead of having to maintain/port it in-house. If there's two of these, it makes sense. Even with one it would otherwise require backporting. Might as well do it in public?
- q3k 5y agoYeah, that blog post was a great reference to get a general overview of What Happened At Myricom. ... and I just hope I didn't write anything factually wrong in TFA. :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 5y agoWhy can you not comment? Certainly any NDA you signed must be expired by now. PSA: If you are not getting continuing payments, any contracts you signed are void. Technically, I gather you are supposed to notify the other party that you are terminating your participation in the contract. Even if you are getting ongoing payments, you can opt out of that, too. (This is not legal advice. Consult an actual lawyer for anything that matters.)
- pcwalton 5y agoIt is absolutely not the case that you can just quit a company, wait a year, and then dump all their confidential information. Even if there were no legal repercussions (which there are), that's a great way to never be hired again.
- postalrat 5y agoNever be hired because you gave away most of your value for free?
- Centigonal 5y agoNever be hired because trust is important in human endeavors
- postalrat 5y agoAt least the illusion of trust. Much more valuable to market your past experience then privately give away your secrets in private.
- ncmncm 5y agoTime since 2015 is rather more than a year. And, all appearances are that any signatory no longer exists, as such. Finally, if you don't yet know about voluntary termination of contracts, you have an opportunity to learn more about it.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
- quercusa 5y agoThis line in that post is mystifying: they peddled Infiniband, an inferior design based on bus technology, but repositioned as a point to point network
- detaro 5y agoI think that's a confusing reference to the fact that InfiniBand initially was supposed to be also a replacement for system-internal buses (i.e. a PCI replacement), before PCIe took that place instead.
- monocasa 5y agoYeah that makes sense, it's an RDMA protocol, and PCIe has wayyyy more in common with infiniband then it does with legacy PCI.
- gnufx 5y agoI wasn't there, but understood it was intended for general machine-room -- I dislike "datacentres" -- use; Wikipedia implies it was intended for ~everything... Anyway, IB at least had lower latency than Myrinet, which is what counts in a lot of HPC. I don't remember the numbers, but I got quite close to Myrinet latency with the on-board 1GbE NICs on Sun x2200s, an un-managed switch, and Open-MX, which was interoperable with the Myrinet MX protocol. (I remember MX being slagged off by Mellanox; I don't know how similar MXM later was for IB.)
- dboreham 5y agoYou can use a bus PHY in a p2p configuration.
- jandrese 5y ago> The CEO capped the full time headcount at 49 people so he wouldn’t be subject to California law requiring him to provide his employees with a health plan. Can you imagine being this stingy and short sighted? The employees are largely PhDs and he is willing to cripple his company to avoid paying benefits.
- drewg123 5y agoI'm not sure that part of Scott's article was accurate. I worked remotely, and I'm pretty sure that I was offered benefits. I declined them, and used my wife's benefits because they were less expensive, and meshed better with local health care providers. EDIT: And I know we had a 401K
- drewg123 5y agoI worked there and have evidence that this statement in the blog is not true, and I'm being down-voted?
- refulgentis 5y agoI don't think so, your comment is black text for me, so it's either at it's original score or higher.
- refulgentis 5y ago
- refulgentis 5y ago
- oefrha 5y agoThere’s a reason guidelines ask you not to discuss downvotes, which always fluctuate. You were adding pure noise to the thread, and you tripled down on that.
- Melatonic 5y agoInteresting - I had never heard of Myricom. I have used Infiniband quite a bit in budget super high performance applications - the old hardware can sometimes be found quite cheaply compared to 40gig/100gig ethernet (or it was at least a few years ago). Much more fiddly to get working but the performance was impressive once it did.
- gnufx 5y agoFor what it's worth, I've had rather more trouble with Ethernet than IB, especially given IB management facilities.
- detaro 5y agoIB always seemed like the kind of thing where you loose out a lot of comfort if you go with "old hardware sometimes found cheaply" and thus don't have vendor support, have to dig out drivers and tools from random sources, ...
- gnufx 5y agoObviously if you don't have driver support for the kernel you run, you can't use old stuff if you want to, but we had SDR IB running quite a long time without support. I don't have happy experience of HPC vendor support anyway, and unfortunately IB is now a Mellanox monoculture.
- Melatonic 5y agoProbably was also difficult because I had no experience working with it, no support, and there is not nearly as many online forum posts and articles written about common issues.
- phkahler 5y agoRegarding the blog post: "Why did Myricom’s second CEO fail so fast, lack of experience, and loss of respect? If one were to attempt to explain the plummeting fortunes of Myricom during the term of the second CEO, two characteristics suggest themselves:" It seems to me the second CEO didn't care about the company, the product or the risk the previous CEO wanted to take (more investment to bring out the new chip). Instead they proposed (and got) another round of dividends for the investors, a promotion to CEO, and ultimately an aqui-hire to Google. To me this reads very simply as putting profit and self-interest ahead of the product. Understandable, and it happens all the time. If you have a vision, the best way to achieve it is to remain in control. Somehow the CEO lost that control.
- _tom_ 5y agoWhen does the NDA expire? 7 years is a long time.
- otterley 5y agoMost NDAs are perpetual.
- Qub3d 5y agoThat is only enforceable for Trade Secrets -- at least in most of the US. Google would need to prove that the things this employee worked on were "essential to the commercial viability of the business". I totally understand not wanting to poke the legal behemoth, however. As an anecdotal, a personal friend who is a former Googler signed a 10-year NDA, and he had his fingers in quite a few pies. So maybe in 3 more years?
- otterley 5y ago> That is only enforceable for Trade Secrets Do you have legal citations supporting this assertion? I'm fairly certain this isn't so.
- Qub3d 5y agoMostly based off this quick search: https://www.everynda.com/blog/duration-clauses-non-disclosure/#Trade_Secrets https://www.everynda.com/blog/duration-clauses-non-disclosur... As I said, I definitely understand not wanting to be the one to actually set precedent - that involves getting sued by Google, which is expensive and potentially career suicide. But I think ultimately its probably not enforceable.
- speed_spread 5y agoI just want the PUNT instruction to become a standard RISC-V extension.
- Fnoord 5y agoPlot twist: you were the CEO.
- alduin32 5y ago> The moral of the story is simple, expect that in a small start-up your stock will NEVER be worth anything, and get what you can in your normal paycheck. That's an important moral. I wish someone had told me that back then.
- dreeple16 5y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but Lanai was designed by Jakov. Who sadly and unexpectedly passed away a few weeks ago.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- waych 5y agoAh shit :-( RIP Jakov
- drewg123 5y agoIndeed, it was quite a shock. Jakov was a wonderful person and the best supervisor one could hope to have. We're all very sad about his passing, and very sad for his family.
- vsrinivas 5y agoI'm sorry to hear Jakov passed away - he was a brilliant, kind engineer.
- vlovich123 5y agoNDAs AFAIK typically last 5 years. Are you sure you can't comment?