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Mark J. Ray

Contributor

Mark J. Ray has been working with AIX for more than 20 years, 18 of which have been spent in performance. His mission is to make the diagnosis and remediation of the most difficult and complex performance issues easy to understand and implement.

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Articles

A Student’s Journey Into Artificial Intelligence | Part 3: GPUs Change the Game

Mark J. Ray

September 28, 2023

In part 2 of this series, we explored the rise of expert systems. In part 3, we’ll cover the 2000’s, AI today and the future of AI. The 2000s: The GPU Age Begins As we moved into the 2000s, all the achievements I listed in part 2 were refined and expanded upon, producing more accurate […]

Articles

A Student’s Journey Into Artificial Intelligence | Part 2: Winter Ends

Mark J. Ray

September 21, 2023

In part one, we looked at the evolution of artificial intelligence from the Stone Age to the 20th century. In this installment, we’ll look at the rise of expert systems. The End of the First AI Winter The first AI Winter ended with the rise of expert systems. These systems are designed to emulate the […]

Articles

A Student’s Journey Into Artificial Intelligence | Part 1: The History

Mark J. Ray

May 9, 2023

The views and information expressed in this article series are those of the author. I stared at my terminal session a long time. As part of a hardware refresh, we’d acquired an IBM AC922. The IBM tech had racked the machine, and we hooked it up to the network. I had planned on using it […]

Articles

Trapping the Elusive Error with AIX Kernel Tracing

Mark J. Ray

April 1, 2018

Every computer administrator must deal with error conditions. This is because every operating system, database and application experiences its own particular types of annoyances. Learning how to combat these conditions requires a combination of experience and instinct. Error conditions can manifest on a regular, recurring schedule, or at totally random times. They may occur in […]

Articles

The Art and Science of AIX Performance: Intuition and Instinct

Mark J. Ray

March 1, 2018

Over the course of this article series, we’ve developed a methodology to attack and resolve performance problems. We've laid the foundation of our remediation efforts by developing a coherent and complete history-taking formula. We've learned about the importance of keeping current on system and device firmware, along with the importance of keeping careful and up-to-date […]

Articles

The Art and Science of AIX Performance: The System Monitors

Mark J. Ray

February 1, 2018

The first three installments in this series of articles cover much ground. We’ve learned how to deploy statistics-gathering programs to collect data on the behavior of system workloads, we understand that maintaining a complete history of those systems and what runs on them is essential to our diagnosis, and we know that keeping firmware up […]

Articles

The Art and Science of AIX Performance: The Stats Utilities

Mark J. Ray

January 1, 2018

This is the third installment in my series on AIX performance. Part 1 focuses on current firmware, the foundation upon which any good AIX system performance is built. I also explain why taking a detailed history is so important to diagnosing performance problems. Part 2 explores the depth to which one can understand how a […]

Articles

Accessing the Data in Core Dumps

Mark J. Ray

January 22, 2006

If you're like most UNIX administrators, you probably have a crontab or some other housekeeping program that regularly searches your systems for core dumps, backs them up (maybe), and then deletes them. This leaves you to try to puzzle out their cause from information contained in the AIX error log. Of course, about half the […]