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- Trend Spotting in 2009January 2
- Welcome to 2009! I've enjoyed nearly two weeks off for the holidays, with limited online work duties, however I routinely found myself returning to my laptop for a myriad of personal activities. Planning for an upcoming business trip to Europe, I ran across this wonderful visualization of London taxi traces through the course of a day, thanks to the wonders of satellite GPS technology. Thinking a bit farther ahead, I prepared for my favorite lottery, the annual February lottery for Mt. Whitney backcountry permits, by downloading the PDF form (unfortunately, you still have to print out and mail in the lottery application via US Postal Service, anyone out there at the Forest Service know how to write an online form, I'll offer to pay for a one year MySQL Enterprise Server subscription if you put the application online). Actually, there is a business idea for someone, create a web site to allow people to fill out paper only US government forms online and then do the hard work of mailing in the forms. Probably some rule against that, but maybe our new president will help. While Forest Service permit applications are probably not high on the to do list, how about a new law that says every new government form needs to have an online version? That would either help jump start the IT market or at least save tax dollars by preventing a lot of new paperwork handl
- Rethinking Application Architectures With FlashDecember 12 2008
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For at least the last 25 years, most software applications were written to run on the same basic computer architecture, a very fast CPU, fast volatile memory, and slow non-volatile disk. Programmers knew that any permanent data needed to be stored on disk, usually in files or in databases. And while memory sizes have been rapidly increasing, there are still many programs that cannot store all the data they need in the memory of even the largest computers and must slow down to read or write data to disk. This 3-tier model (CPU/Memory/Disk) is actually slightly more complicated in that while CPU speeds have doubled every 12-18 months, memory speeds have only doubled approximately every 6 years. CPU designers thus added increasing amounts of very fast memory, called cache memory, onto the CPU chip itself. Modern processors today typically have from 4 to 12 MBytes of cache memory, and in fact it is not uncommon for half or more of the transistors of the CPU chip to be taken up by cache.
Over the last several years, the entire Cache/Main Memory/Disk infrastructure has been put under more pressure with the rapid adoption of multi-core CPU architectures such as first widely used in Sun's OpenSPARC design. Because the specification for building an OpenSPARC chip is freely available to all, hundreds of universities are actually teaching their CPU design courses today using OpenSPARC, and Intel, AMD, a
- 18 Months Of OpenSolaris InnovationDecember 10 2008
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Congratulations to the entire Solaris team for
today's launch of OpenSolaris 2008.11. While the credit for this amazing new release goes to many, many Sun, Intel, AMD, and other developers who worked on the release through the OpenSolaris Community, I will always consider the OpenSolaris distro one of my babies. Here is just a bit of the story.
Back in April 2007, Ian Murdock and myself, both new to Solaris marketing, took Jonathan's challenge of making Solaris more approachable and friendly to a wider range of developers and users. Solaris' key innovations, featutres like ZFS, Dtrace, and Zones were already being used back then by many Sun customers, it was just that we wanted to attract more new developers and users to Solaris, including many that were used to working with other operating systems. So off we went with a goal, to release a new OpenSolaris distribution within six months. For the first few months, all Ian and I heard, over and over again, was, "you have 0% probability of success in launching a new OpenSolaris distribution in 6 months". Luckily, a lot of Solaris developers thought otherwise.
The goals for the first release were rather simple.
Get it out in six months, and we set October 2007 as our deadline The distribution must fit on a CD, and live boot (getting t - New Sun Constellation System HPC UpgradesDecember 9 2008
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Today's launch of the
Sun Blade x6440 server module brings new levels of performance to the Sun Constellation System. With its industry leading memory footprint and I/O performance, the Sun Blade X6440 server module posted a world record 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications (Sun Blade X6440 server module, 4 chips, 16 cores, 16 OMP threads, 35896 SPECompMpeak2001). Delivering on Sun's future proof blade server design, the Sun Blade x6440 brings new levels of scalability to the
Sun Constellation System supercomputer. In fact, if TACC's Ranger supercomputer, currently #6 on the Top500 list, were to be upgraded with x6440 modules, I estimate it would jump from its current 6th place ranking to #3 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Of course, since not everyone needs a half petaflop supercomputer, unlike some of the other proprietary systems in the Top 10, the Sun Constellation System scales down to much lower cost supercomputers that you don't need a roomful of PhD's to design or operate. In fact, the new Sun C
- Thinking of HawaiiDecember 5 2008
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About this time of year I start longing for a trip to Hawaii. Work does not allow such a respite this month, but here is an amazing picture taken earlier this week.
Download a high resolution image and read more about Kilauea, the most active volcano in Hawaii. The above image was taken on December 3, 2008 by NASA's Aqua satellite using a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and shows an exceptionally thick gray-white haze hanging low over the Hawaiian Islands. Makes me feel at least a little better that I was here in California working with customers on supercomputer projects that make images like the one above possible instead of laying on the beach. Really.