Wanted to advertise my friend's new blog: Pragmatic Conservatism

We grew up together in Florida and I look forward to working on his campaign down the road.

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Srinivas Aluru, left, and Steve Nystrom have worked for months to connect cables and cooling hoses and otherwise get Iowa State University's second supercomputer up to speed. Photo by Bob Elbert.

 AMES, Iowa - Srinivas Aluru recently stepped between the two rows of six tall metal racks, opened up the silver doors and showed off the 3,200 computer processor cores that power Cystorm, Iowa State University's second supercomputer.

And there's a lot of raw power in those racks.

Cystorm, a Sun Microsystems machine, boasts a peak performance of 28.16 trillion calculations per second. That's five times the peak of CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that's been on campus since early 2006 and uses 2,048 processors to do 5.7 trillion calculations per second.

Aluru, the Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of Computer Engineering and the leader of the Cystorm project, said the new machine also scores high on a more realistic test of a supercomputer's actual performance: 15.44 trillion calculations per second compared to CyBlue's 4.7 trillion per second. That measure makes Cystorm 3.3 times more powerful than CyBlue.

Those performance numbers, however, do not earn Cystorm a spot on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. (When CyBlue went online three years ago, it was the 99th most powerful supercomputer on the list.)

"Cystorm is going to be very good for data-intensive research projects," Aluru said. "The capabilities of Cystorm will help Iowa State researchers do new, pioneering research in their fields."

The supercomputer is targeted for work in materials science, power systems and systems biology.

 Aluru said materials scientists will use the supercomputer to analyze data from the university's Local Electrode Atom Probe microscope, an instrument that can gather data and produce images at the atomic scale of billionths of a meter. Systems biologists will use the supercomputer to build gene networks that will help researchers understand how thousands of genes interact with each other. Power systems researchers will use the supercomputer to study the security, reliability and efficiency of the country's energy infrastructure. And computer engineers will use the supercomputer to build a software infrastructure that helps users make decisions by identifying relevant information sources.

"These research efforts will lead to significant advances in the penetration of high performance computing technology," says a summary of the Cystorm project. "The project will bring together multiple departments and research centers at Iowa State University and further enrich interdisciplinary culture and training opportunities."

Joining Aluru on the Cystorm project are five Iowa State researchers: Maneesha Aluru, an associate scientist in electrical and computer engineering and genetics, development and cell biology; Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, an assistant professor and William March Scholar in Mechanical Engineering; James McCalley, the Harpole Professor in Electrical Engineering; Krishna Rajan, a professor of materials science and engineering; and Arun Somani, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and Jerry R. Junkins Endowed Chair of electrical and computer engineering. Steve Nystrom, a systems support specialist for the department of electrical and computer engineering, is the system administrator for Cystorm.

The researchers purchased the computer with a $719,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, $400,000 from Iowa State colleges, departments and researchers, and a $200,000 equipment donation from Sun Microsystems.

Because of Cystorm, the computer company will designate Iowa State a Sun Microsystems Center of Excellence for Engineering Informatics and Systems Biology.

While Cystorm is much more powerful than CyBlue, Aluru said Iowa State's first supercomputer will still be used by researchers across campus.

"CyBlue will still be around," Aluru said. "Researchers will use both systems to solve problems. Both systems enhance the research capabilities of Iowa State."

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Contacts:

Srinivas Aluru, Electrical and Computer Engineering, (515) 294-3539, aluru@iastate.edu

Mike Krapfl, News Service, (515) 294-4917, mkrapfl@iastate.edu

The Sun GEH SE team has been compiling the SERUG and other training events on Sun's Learning Exchange (SLX). You will find some great content regarding recent GEH user group meetings . Including VDI and SAGE presentations and podcasts. This site is maintained by Paul Telles, GEH SE.

Suggestions and feedback on the content is greatly appreciated.

For all GEH Industry & Partners Media content on SLX.

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Throughout JavaOne each and every of the participants has access to
three personal desktops running Windows, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris. All
virtual machines are hosted on Sun VirtualBox servers and stored on Sun's Unified Storage platform. Sun's desktop virtualization product Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3 is used to manage the virtual machines and deliver the desktop to the Ultra Thin Clients called Sun Ray clients.

VDI Architecture at JavaOne

For the conference we are using a relatively small setup compared to
the number of desktops to be hosted, that focuses on responsiveness of
the desktops, sized for an upper limit of 400 to 500 desktops running
at the same time.

More Info on VDI

• Sun VDI 3 Software Product Page


• Sun VDI 3 Software Product Documention


• Sun VDI Software User Forum


• Sun VirtualBox


• Unified Storage


• OpenSolaris

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Check out these deals from Sun !

And for education customers, the matching grant program is the way to get fantastic deals on Sun technology:

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Coralville Public Library,  located in  Iowa, has deployed Sun's Virtual Desktop Solution. Teri Rodgers, webitarian and VDI technologists, chose the virtual desktop as a way for the library to efficiently deploy desktop units for all sections of the library. With over thirty Sun Ray 270 models placed throughput the library, patrons can enjoy access to web-enabled applications and the internet. The children's section has desktops with creative names such as 'Pooh' and 'Tigger' enticing the children to play approved multi-media games, learning modules, and videos.

 Sun Ray units deployed in the library's reference section

A user at the 'Tigger' Sun Ray station enjoys his on-line game.

The library has recently order the Gobi wireless Sun Ray laptop to add mobility for the users of the VDI solution.

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In case you haven't heard, there is an amazing Student offer for JavaOne this year- Students get in free!  Plus, they can sign up for CommunityOne at the same time.  Both passes are full conference passes with access to everything!  Educators (your professors) can also get in free when they bring 10 students with them to the conference.  If they aren't able to do this, they still get a fantastic deal of $895 for a full conference pass.

What is a Full Pass? 
All the benefits of a FULL conference attendee, which includes: JavaOne general and technical sessions, panel discussions, HOLs (Hands-on-labs), BOFs (Birds-of-a-feather), the Pavilion and the After Dark Bash / Networking Mixer!  Not to mention a "hang space" (which includes video games, movies & more!), plus you will be able to check email any time at one of our many hacker stations.

PLUS
Admission to the CommunityOne Deep-Dives.  What does this mean?  FREE training by our very own SLS on some really great topics, plus hugely discounted certification (vouchers will be handed out at the event)- certification can even be done on-site!  There will also be numerous parties and chances for you to network with the best and brightest in the industry, from community leaders to "Rockstars" and everyone in between.

Here is the registration page set up just for students: Register Now !

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I got to meet LeAnn Rimes in Nashville tonight. My wife took the blurry picture of the two of us (not technically savvy to say the least) . I asked her for a picture for my blog and she obliged.

LeAnn speaking to the crowd at the book signing.

Nice picture Sweetheart ! Can you even tell it is her ???? CLASSIC !

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Beginning next month fans of The Rolling Stones will have much to rejoice about with the arrival of re-mastered versions of "Sticky Fingers," "Goats Head Soup," "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll" and "Black And Blue".

And it doesn't end there. In June, the band will continue their re-issue campaign with Universal Music Group with the re-issue of "Some Girls," "Emotional Rescue," "Tattoo You" and "Undercover," followed by "Dirty Work," "Steel Wheels," "Voodoo Lounge," "Bridges To Babylon" and their most recent album of all new material, "A Bigger Bang".

Astute fans will notice the absence of the masterful "Exile On Main St." from the release schedule. Hailed by Rolling Stone magazine, where "Exile On Main St." was rated the 7th Greatest Album Of All Time, as "Jagger and Richards' definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit," no one has forgotten about the marquee album, least of all The Rolling Stones. A late 2009 re-issue of "Exile On Main St." is being planned as part of a wider celebration that will accompany its release.

In a nod to the band's diehard fans, UMG will also be releasing a collector's box in which to house all 14 post-1971 studio albums, as well as making the catalogue newly available digitally.

More news will be available shortly.

NAU was just added as a Customer Success Story !

The new MP3 can be downloaded here: NAU MP3

NAU Success Story Summary

Business Issues:

• Provide students with access to Windows and UNIX desktops 

• Maximize lab space 

• Reduce IT costs 

• Simplify IT management
  

Solution:

• NAU’s W. A. Franke College of Business built a virtual desktop solution with Sun hardware and software. Students use Sun Ray thin clients, PCs, and mobile computers to access Windows and UNIX environments hosted on Sun servers and storage. Along with meeting the university’s shrinking budget, the Sun technologies are flexible, offer a small footprint, provide excellent energy efficiency and return on investment.

• Cut total carbon footprint of individual desktop machines by 95%  

• Reduced the annual electrical costs of individual desktop machines by 95% 

• Provided anytime, anywhere access to Windows and UNIX desktops 

• Cut IT costs 

• Increased return on investment
  

Products/Services/Solutions:

• Sun Ray 270 and Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients

• Sun Ray 170 Thin Client

• Sun Ray 1g Thin ClientSolaris 10 Operating System

• Sun Secure Global Desktop Software

• Sun xVM VDI 3.0 Early Access

• SunSpectrum Gold Support

• Sun Fire X4150 Server

• Sun Fire X4200 M2 ServerSun Fire T2000 Server  

• Sun StorageTek 2530 Array

You can download NAU's presentation to the GEH Virtual Sun Users Group on December 17, 2008. These slides are a supplement to the MP3 recording.

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New on Sun.Com: 

Hope to see you on campus soon.

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Does your organization currently run Magma, Maple, Mathematica, or  Matlab? If so, you will like to hear more about Sage Math ! Sage, a free open source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. Sage can be used to study  general and advanced, pure and applied mathematics. This includes a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, exact linear algebra and much more. It combines various software packages and seamlessly integrates their functionality into a common experience. It is well suited  for education, studying and research.

William Stein is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington and will be presenting to SERUG this month. He is also the author of two books on number theory, many papers, and the lead developer of the open source software project, Sage.

You can download William Stein's Presentation !

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The presentations from our January 21st meeting have been posted to the Sun Learning eXchange.

Our speakers for the event were: Ms. Harriet Coverston, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Roger L. Smith, Senior Systems Administrator, Mississippi State University, High Performance Computing Collaboratory

Ms. Harriet Coverston has over 35 years of Kernel design and development  in HPC Systems. Ms. Coverston worked at Lawrence Livermore National  Laboratory from 1967 to 1974. While at the Lab, Ms. Coverston participated on a 5 person team who wrote the CDC 7600 Livermore Timesharing System. Ms. Coverston worked for Control Data Corporation from 1974 to 1986. Ms. Coverston worked on the Cyber 205 Operating System and CDCNET. Ms. Coverston founded LSC in 1986. At LSC, Ms.  Coverston was VP of Technology. She architected and implemented SAM-FS, an advanced storage management system, and QFS, a high performance file system. Sun Microsystems acquired LSC in 2001. Ms. Coverston is a Distinguished Engineer. Ms. Coverston designed and implemented Shared QFS, a SAN file system. Currently, Ms. Coverston is enhancing Shared QFS to support the T10 OSD protocol.

Harriet Coverston's Presentation:

Roger L. Smith's Presentation:

Additional Resources:
SAM-QFS Wiki
Instructor Led Training for Administrators

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Northern Arizona University - Building the Green Computing Campus

Richard Toeniskoetter serves as the Technology Director for The W. A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University. Newly rebuilt three years ago, the college places key emphasis on providing flexible, innovative student environments, while being a leader in sustainability. The college has been designated a LEED gold certified building, and runs over 240 Sun Ray virtual display clients coupled with Sun's Secure Global Desktop software, allowing students cost effective and energy efficient access to computing both on and off campus.

You can download Richard's presentation to the GEH Virtual Sun Users Group on December 17, 2008.

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From Gary Serda's EDU Blog: 

Competitive Edge For New College Grads

Let's face it. The job market for new college grads is getting tougher by the day. My advice - graduate with a degree from your university and a certification from Sun.

Through the Sun Academic Initiative (SAI), Sun provides students with valuable resources to pursue this career enhancing strategy and get a competitive edge as you enter the workforce. Sun certification is recognized industry-wide and demonstrates competency in high-demand technologies, such as the Java programming language and the Solaris Operating System. In other words, certification is tangible proof to employers of skills and knowledge needed for certain jobs.

Of course, there is this other important benefit - higher pay. According to a Certification Magazine Salary Survey, Sun Certification increases earning power:

• Sun Certified Programmers earn on average 8.3% more than the average programmer

• Sun Certified Developers earn on average 14.3% more than the average developer

• Sun Certified System Administrators earn on average 31% more than system administrators certified on other operating systems

Professional certifications are available to SAI participants in these key areas:

• Sun Certified Java Associate (SCJA)

• Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP)

• Sun Certified System Administrator (SCSA)

• Sun Certified Network Administrator (SCNA)

• Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD)

Sun certification exams are heavily discounted for students participating in the SAI program. For example, exams that normally cost $160 for professionals are $60 in the U.S. and $40 in Latin America and Asia.

The SAI provides access to free web-based courses to learn Sun technologies at your own pace at times that are convenient for you. SAI students also have access to ePractice Certification Exams. These no-cost web based practice exams include sample test questions, the correct answers with explanations, and provides the test taker with suggestions for future study.

Click here to register for the SAI. We will email you the information you need to create your personal user account on the SAI Learning Connection, Sun's learning portal for students.

For more information or to join the SAI - visit the SAI Website.

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Happy Birthday Keith !

65 years young today.

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Just returned from a trip to Austin, TX for Super Computing 08 conference. Austin is the home of TACC, on the campus of University of Texas.

Here are the details on the Ranger system:

Sun Constellation Linux Cluster

System Name:	Ranger
Host Name:	ranger.tacc.utexas.edu
IP Address:	129.114.50.163
Operating System:	Linux
Number of Nodes:	3,936
Number of Processing Cores:	62,976
Total Memory:	123TB
Peak Performance:	579.4TFlops
Total Disk:	1.73PB (shared) 31.4TB (local)
Description:
Ranger is the largest computing system in the world for open science research. As the first of the new NSF Track2 HPC acquisitions, this system provides unprecedented computational capabilities to the national research community and ushers in the petascale science era. Ranger will enable breakthrough science that has never before been possible, and will provide groundbreaking opportunities in computational science & technology research – from parallel algorithms to fault tolerance, from scalable visualization to next generation programming languages. Ranger went into production on February 4, 2008 using Linux (based on a CentOS distribution). The system components are connected via a full-CLOS InfiniBand interconnect. Eighty-two compute racks house the quad-socket compute infrastructure, with additional racks housing login, I/O, and general management hardware. Compute nodes are provisioned using local storage. Global, high-speed file systems will be provided, using the Lustre file system, running across 72 I/O servers. Users will interact with the system via four dedicated login servers, and a suite of eight high-speed data servers. Resource management for job scheduling will be provided with Sun Grid Engine (SGE). Any researcher at a U.S. institution can submit a proposal to request an allocation of cycles on the system. The request must describe the research, justify the need for such a powerful system to achieve new scientific discoveries, and demonstrate that the proposer's team has the expertise to utilize the resource effectively. · 90% of the system is dedicated to the TeraGrid (http://www.teragrid.org) · 5% of the system is allocable to Texas higher education institutions · 5% of the system is allocable to industry through TACCs Science & Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) Program To submit a proposal to request an allocation, please visit the TeraGrid website.

Here is a photo of myself at TACC:

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The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA - News) today announced the arrival of AMSTAR, a new digital storage library that will preserve and protect valuable scientific data for the next 15 to 20 years. The new system, designed by Sun Microsystems and based on the Sun StorageTek(TM) SL8500 Modular Library, will give NCAR five times its current storage capacity, enabling it to generate increasingly sophisticated computer studies of Earth’s climate.

“We have a responsibility to science and to future generations of researchers,” says Al Kellie, director of NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL). “Scientists are dedicating themselves to giving us a better understanding of our climate and our world, and we are dedicated to keeping their results safe and accessible.” 

NCAR's Mass Storage System (MSS), or data library, is one of the largest archives in the world dedicated to geoscience research. It holds historical international climate records that are irreplaceable, data from field experiments and observations, and information gathered from weather stations, ships, planes, and satellites.

But the bulk of NCAR’s MSS data is generated by global climate simulations, weather models, and other Earth systems models that run on NCAR’s supercomputers. Data archival demands continually grow as simulations become more sophisticated, and as atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land cover climate models are combined into increasingly detailed runs.

The new Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library Systems will give NCAR up to 30 petabytes of storage capacity in addition to achieving higher speeds without increasing power requirements.

The capacity and design of the Sun Storage products will allow NCAR to connect the SL8500 Modular Library Systems to its MSS without having to rewrite any code. The system uses Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drives to store the data, with each tape capable of holding up to a terabyte (1,024 gigabytes) of data.

"Sun and NCAR have a relationship going back almost 20 years," said Jason Schaffer, Senior Director of Storage, Sun Microsystems. "When NCAR's storage needs jumped up 180 terabytes per month, we were pleased to win the competitive bidding by offering a Sun Storage product that could handle this increased capacity. We believe that the superior reliability and scalability of the SL8500, and world-recognized Service quality, made us the preferred choice.”

NCAR’s current MSS has reached its maximum capacity of six petabytes, less than six years after crossing the one-petabyte mark. A petabyte is the equivalent of 223,101 DVDs, or over 8,730 iPod Classics.

The assembly of AMSTAR's first two production libraries was completed last week. An additional library will be installed in 2010 to expand the AMSTAR system. Once the first two production libraries become operational in December, it will take approximately 18 months for NCAR to transfer all of the data from the current MSS tape archive to the new system, at a data transfer rate of about 140 megabytes per second. New data will be stored directly on the new system, as soon as testing is complete.

“We currently have over a thousand scientists around the world accessing this information for their research,” said Tom Bettge, director of operations and services at CISL. “Ensuring that they can access and store the data easily, safely, and reliably is a task NCAR takes very seriously.”

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.