- Blablador-news - lists.fz-juelich.de

New coding model: Qwen-Next 80b
by Strube, Alexandre 04 Feb '26

04 Feb '26

so far, we had two coding models: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct, from august. and Devstral-Small-2-24B-Instruct-2512, from december. Qwen3-Coder-Next was released and deployed at blablador yesterday. It’s an 80B parameter model, with only 3b activated at any time - meaning it is FAST In fact, it’s one of our fastest models right now, and a pretty good one. All the three are hooked on alias-code, meaning you might get any of them - which is something I was considering to change. Anyone against me phasing down qwen3-coder from august? By the way, blablador works as a charm with OpenCode and OpenCLAW. I recommend you give it a try - especially opencode. Let’s bark! Alex, sick AF but always working :-)

1 0

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
by Strube, Alexandre 02 Feb '26

02 Feb '26

Finally, after a long time, we got some new GPUS. This allows us to not need to count with the litany of scripts we’ve been using to get some nodes on the JURECA-WestAI supercomputer. What does that entail: - Stability should to up, a lot: by having the models running on nodes allocated only for Blablador 24/7, availability and stability will go up a lot. No more models failing to launch because the machine is too busy. - Performance improvements: by removing the middle-man of proxy jumps and other dark magic I’ve been doing, things should be smoother. This means more tokens for us! - More models: we want to use the new nodes for the latest and greatest models, but now one can use the available time on JURECA-WestAI to run gigantic models experimentally, suck as Kimi-K2.5, for example. As this would be done in a experimental way as Blablador always did, models will come and go according to needs, requests and voices in my head. I would like to Fritz Niesel and Stefan Kesselheim for making possible to have Blablador to run on the WestAI machine. Without that, the Blablador would have been a much smaller dog. Thanks also to Konstantin Rushschanskii, who has been doing magic with kubernetes and who improved model reliability a lot on the weirdest times of the day. Thanks to Tim Kreuzer for the patience he’s been showing us with our random and absurd questions. Thanks to the sysadmins of Jureca and Julich cloud, especially Sebastian Achilles. You guys are the best. Right now, the only models running on the new hardware are GPT-OSS, a personal favorite of many, and Minimax 2.1, which in my opinion is the best model we have right now. Let’s bark this weekend! Alex, Blablador Honcho

2 2

Helmholtz Codebase outage
by Strube, Alexandre 27 Jan '26

27 Jan '26

Blablador uses Helmholtz Gitlab for authentication, and the server is currently down. Planned Maintenance The Helmholtz Codebase is currently unavailable due to a planned maintenance of the database. Start: January 27th, 15:55 (CET / UTC+1) Planned End: January 27th, 17:00 (CET / UTC+1) Sorry for that :-(

1 0

Do you want an app?
by Strube, Alexandre 23 Jan '26

23 Jan '26

[image] Would you like it? The Siri/android voice integration has been difficult, so it’s basically a website inside an app, like most of them are these days . []s Alexandre Strube surak(a)surak.eti.br

1 0

GLM 4.7 FULL
by Strube, Alexandre 22 Jan '26

22 Jan '26

After the great news of GLM-Flash, I decided to try the full, 385 billion parameter GLM 4.7. And guess what? It’s running! Compared to Minimax, it is slower, but better at math, and multi-modal. It can understand text, video, images and audio. While Minimax is theoretically capable of one million tokens, GLM is limited to 204 thousand. Given that is just slightly better than Minimax, while being slower, I am not sure if I will keep running it. What do you think? Leeeeeeet’s bark! Alex

1 1

What a difference a small patch makes...
by Strube, Alexandre 22 Jan '26

22 Jan '26

Following a hint found on Twitter [1], a little patch on VLLM allowed me to increase the context length on the GLM 4.7-Flash models from 8000 to 200000 (!) tokens. Now, those models get good rankings, but they REALLY overthink. The good thing is that if this patch works with other models, I can run the big GLM 4.7 on bigger nodes! Let’s bark! [1] https://x.com/TheAhmadOsman/status/2013881920099062163

1 1

GLM 4-7 Flash in two variants!
by Strube, Alexandre 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Hello Blabladores! Some of you might have heard of the best medium-sized model released last night, GLM-4.7 Flash. You know the story: It’s slightly better than last week’s model of similar capacity. It’s a 31 billion parameter model, a mixture-of-experts with 3 billion activated. As we hear more and more about strongly quantizing models, I decided to run an experiment. I am running not one, but two versions of GLM 4.7-Flash: One with quantization and one without. Given that they are running on identical hardware (4x RTX 3090 each), something has to give: the not-quantized model has a smaller context length (around 18k tokens, vs 68k tokens for the quantized one). The quantized one is slightly faster, but not by much. I might have to optimize it still. In any case, they are both available for you to compare. What is better: Quantized but bigger context or not-quantized but smaller? You decide. Let’s bark! Alex

1 0

Ghristmas Mrrey!
by Strube, Alexandre 26 Dec '25

26 Dec '25

I found this jacket in a clothes stall at one of the Vienna’s Christmas market couple years ago. I regret to this day not having bought it. Anyway, I’m writing to let you know that NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16 is running since day one, and from tonight, Minimax 2.1 is replacing Minimax 2 as our alias-huge model. Have some rest and go hug someone. Let’s bark, Alex, el Blablador

1 0

And we are back!
by Strube, Alexandre 03 Dec '25

03 Dec '25

So, the updates on the JSC infrastructure went pretty smoothly, and we are already back for some hours! While some instability might happen tomorrow, for now, we’re barking as loud as ever! PS: Mistral released their latest models, Mistral 3, yesterday. It’s already on Blablador for you to try with, and with function calling! Keep barking! Alex, el Blablador

1 0

Big models unavailable Wednesday and Thursday
by Strube, Alexandre 01 Dec '25

01 Dec '25

Dec 3, 2025, 07:00 - Dec 4, 2025, 19:00 A planned maintenance for the network backbone at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) datacenter is scheduled from 07:00 CET on 2025-12-03 to 19:00 CET on 2025-12-04. During this period, all HPC, data, and cloud systems at JSC will be unavailable. Sorry for that :-( Alex, el Blablador

1 1