Brandon E Taylor's Weblog Cogitations, Meditations, and Ruminations

Datacenter in a Can?

I am dying to take a peek inside one of these containers. Since I am based in Broomfield, I will just have to settle for pictures for now.

Now that we have shown the world ours, maybe Google will trot theirs out as well. :-) ( Oct 18 2006, 12:35:26 AM PDT ) Permalink

Another Big HPC Win

From http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/general/press/announcements/20060928_01.php:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $59 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to acquire, operate and support a high-performance computing system that will provide unprecedented computational power to the nation’s research scientists and engineers.

...

TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 trillion bytes (terabytes) of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek™ disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processors.

You can download System Manager for free here and Grid Engine for free here. Don't forget to sign up for an Sun Developer Network account and check out the BigAdmin portal while you're at it. ( Sep 30 2006, 11:24:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Inquirer Hails Sun as Price Leader

V40z Wins a Well-Connected Award

The Sun Fire V40z has recently earned a Well-Connected Award, awarded by Network Computing magazine, in the Server category. Comments from the article announcing the awards:

"As for servers, with security, performance and reliability looming large on the minds of our readers, we chose the SunFire 40z as the best of its kind. Whatever else you may think of Sun Microsystems, there's no denying it makes some of the best technology around, and the SunFire 40z is no exception."

Congratulations V40z team!
( May 09 2005, 03:01:59 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

N1 in the News

A recent Computerworld article mentions a new N1 offering, code-named HotDog, that will be announced in the near future. I am looking forward to the announcement with great anticipation. Some of this anticipation can no doubt be attributed to my close involvement with the project. :-)

Read the article here.
( Apr 20 2005, 10:18:26 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Cisco Acquiring Topspin

Cisco announced today that it is acquiring Topspin, a privately-held company focused on developing InfiniBand-based switching technology for server fabrics. Cisco is shelling out approximately $250M in cash and options for Topspin.
( Apr 14 2005, 02:05:32 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

National Medal of Technology

The recipients of the 2003 National Medal of Technology were recently presented their awards by President Bush at a White House ceremony. The recipients of this prestigious award included:

• Robert Metcalfe - "For leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet."
• Watts Humphrey - "For his vision of a discipline for software engineering, for his work toward meeting that vision, and for the resultant impact on the U.S. Government, industry, and academic communities."

Another V40Z Review

I recently blogged about a review AnandTech did on the Sun Fire V40Z. Today, I happened across an earlier V40Z review, this one presented by LinuxWorld. Conclusions from the review:

"The [Sun] Fire V40z provides a very flexible hardware platform on which you could deploy any application."

"The V40z is an exceedingly powerful and adaptable machine in a very small package."

"After a month of using this machine, I really have very little to find fault with. I'd be happy to recommend the V40z as an excellent multipurpose server in an SME, or as a departmental or task-specific server in a larger organization."
( Mar 02 2005, 12:53:48 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sodium Dropping

I have dropped my fair share of sodium into water. Theodore Gray, however, has set out to "produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions." The result is both informative and highly entertaining. Sodium chunks of up to 175 grams were employed in the experiments.
( Mar 01 2005, 04:52:35 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Heroes of Engineering

The ASME is publishing a monthly online comic series devoted to significant personages and events in mechanical engineering. To date, the following issues have been released:

• 01/05 - Robert Thurston - "Closing the gap between practive and theory"
• 02/05 - Michael Owenw - "The Automatic Glassblower"
• 03/05 - Wright Brothers - "Wind Tunnel Visionaries"

Sun Fire V40Z Reviewed

AnandTech has recently published a nice review of the Sun Fire V40Z, our 3U four-way x64 server. Here are a few choice quotes:

"Sun has a speed daemon on their hands, and they know it."

"...the enthusiastic approach to Linux coupled with high quality design and management already assure that Sun has won the battle to most, without even raising a finger for benchmarks."

"As far as stability goes, we know that the Sun Fire V40z is certainly best of breed."
( Feb 25 2005, 11:47:10 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

2004 Turing Award

Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn have received the 2004 A.M. Turing Award. The 2004 award was presented "For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking."

Recommended Reading:

• V. G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn. "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." IEEE Transactions on Communications, 22(5), May 1974, pp. 637-648

Mathematical Model of Eiffel Tower

University of Colorado Assistant Professor Patrick Weidman and Michigan Technological University Professor Iosif Pinelis have recently published a paper - "Model Equations for the Eiffel Tower Profile: Historical Perspective and New Results" - in the French journal Comptes Rendus Mecanique. In this paper, Weidman and Pinelis present a nonlinear integral-differential equation whose solution yields the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The tower's profile is "composed of two piecewise continuous exponentials with different growth rate".
( Feb 23 2005, 10:41:13 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Next Gen x64 Servers

Galaxy, Sun's next generation Opteron-based x64 server initiative, was mentioned in a recent InfoWorld article. I cannot wait until we go to market with these servers. They are going to be hot!
( Feb 16 2005, 01:31:15 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunbird Released

The Mozilla Sunbird team announced yesterday the first official release of Sunbird, a standalone version of the Mozilla Calendar component. The 0.2 release supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
( Feb 05 2005, 12:57:32 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]