Wednesday April 20, 2005 Brutus's pergrunt weblog
My current plan is to make my blog mostly Sun related. However, like many Sun employees, and techies in general, much of my life is related to work :-)So, the line between work and personal time is very blurry at best, who knows what may end up here ?
First off, I go by the name Brutus, I'm a senior staff engineer working in the NPT (Network Performance Team) of Solaris at the Menlo Park CA USA campus.
A little history about my time at Sun and in the computer industry ... In a place far away (Detroit MI, USA) and a time long ago (late 60's) I started playing with computers, had several part time jobs in the industry, but ended up working full-time as a truck driver as programers in the early 70's weren't paid very much while truck drivers started at 2x - 3x the wage :-)
In the mid 70's I was still playing around with computers, mostly DEC PDP running RT-11, RSX-11, and RSTS/E operating systems, and I also played around with a new OS of the time UNIX.
I decided (or should I say Life decided for me but that's another story :-) to take a job in the computer industry at an intermediate school district.
In the late 70's worked for a small firm doing all sorts of odd programing jobs working in many different languages and operating systems and hardware.
In the early 80's started working for a telephony company called CCI (Computer Consoles Inc) working in the Unix OS group on a new computer called the 5/32 (multiprocessor 68k Unix) and later 5/32X.
Next I worked on a new CCI computer called the Tahoe series which was a VAX like clone (but much faster) with up to 2 proccessors, I worked on a master/slave BDS/S3 merged Unix kernel. Of note, this computer was the platform used to develop the 4.3BSD Tahoe release, hence the name :-)
CCI was bought by ICL which used SPARC processors which was bought by Fujitsu which also used SPARC processors and had new SPARC chip SPARC64 but alas there where too many SPARC projects and our division was closed ... Hummm, why not go work for Sun ?
So, in 1993 I got a job at Sun in the Internet group, I hadn't had any experience in network to this date as I had always been an OS guy but as it turned out Sun's Internet group was looking for some fresh ideas on their STREAMS based Solaris 2.3 protocol stack and besides any changes would likely require OS work so I said "Why not !!!".
Ever since joining Sun, or for that mater even before, I have always worked in the area of performance. Not just making existing code go faster but designing performance into every project. When I joined Sun a term used to describe one who primarily works in the performance area was "perfgrunt", hence the title of my blog.
My past projects include, TCP/IP single-copy/checksum, DLPI hardware inet checksum extensions, Solaris 2.5.1 ISS, NCA (Network Cache and Accelerator), and FireEngine for Solaris 10.
For FireEngine I took my experience of almost 10 years with STREAMS and the IP protocol stack along with my design of NCA which has it's own fast scalable TCP/IP protocol stack and applied it to the core protocol stack by providing early architectural design, development, and consulting.
Once development of the FireEngine project was well underway I moved on to work on another project, an entry for a future blog :-)
Outside of work I enjoy traveling with my wife Yana, playing with our 2 Cavalier King Charles Spaniels Lizzie & Jessie, big trucks, fast cars, and bowling.
Currently I'm on rotation working at Sun's Beijing China ERI (Engineering Research Institute) campus working with local engineers on working at Sun in addition to my regular project work. More on this in a future blog entry.
I hope to hear from our Solaris customers and in the not to distant future as Open Solaris is rolled out our Solaris developer community on any and all issues with Solaris network performance.
Brutus ( Apr 20 2005, 10:21:48 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [13]