Monday July 26, 2004
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Monday July 26, 2004 What would you do with the fastest workstation on earth?
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As many of you know (and many don't), the "W" in "SUNW" stands for "Workstations", because Andreas von Bechtolsheim (I wish he started a Blog, I wouldn't even mind if he wrote it in German...) invented the first Workstation called Sun 1 in 1982 which would then become the very first Sun product. Andy has recently rejoined Sun after his successful adventures with Cisco Systems and Kealia. Today, 22 years later, we have introduced Sun's first x86-based Workstations, the Sun Java Workstation W1100z and the Sun Java Workstation W2100z. As you can see, even the product name grew by 22 characters, 1 per year :). At the moment, the Sun Java Workstation W2100z is the fastest Workstation on earth, so I put it on top of my newly-created list of favourite Sun products to the right of this blog. As of today, it comes with two AMD Opteron CPUs (Models 244, 246, 248 or 250), supports true simultaneous 32- and 64-Bit x86-based computing, runs Solaris x86, many GNU/Linux variants, including the Sun Java Desktop System and (yuck!) Microsoft Windows XP if you must have it. Other technical features include: HyperTransport CPU-to-CPU and CPU-to-I/O links with 2x3.2 GB/s bandwidth per link, 1MB L2 cache per CPU, integrated 128-bit wide DDR-400 ECC memory controller with up to 16 GB RAM (registered PC3200) memory, 4 independent PCI-X buses with 5 64-Bit PCI-X slots (1 @ 133 MHz half, 1 @ 100 MHz half, 3 @ 100 MHz full-length), one AGP8x slot for graphics, an embedded Ultra320 SCSI-controller, 5 x USB 2.0, 2 x 1394a, 1 x GBE ports and standard DVD-ROM/CD-RW (DVD +/- R/RW optional) drive. Read the white paper and don't forget to wipe your table and keyboard after drooling. |
Gaming will probably come to mind quite easily. You can play a lot of Linux games as well as a lot of Java-based games and of course an infamous amount of Windows based games, of which an increasing amount are just Java-based that happen to run on Windows, you just don't know it (examples include EA's Command and Conquer™: Attack Copter, Law and Order II and Roboforge). Of course, this is a great machine to develop games with, and you can get the W2100z's little brother, the Sun Java Workstation W1100z for free if you sign up with Sun Developer Network program. More serious developers are invited too, of course :).
I'm also sure that this is a very cool workstation to do content creation with. Fortunately, many design tools for content creation are becoming available on Unix OSs such as Linux (and I hope soon on Solaris x86 as well), for instance Alias Maya, SideFX Houdini (my favourite) and of course the open source Blender plus many, many more.
This is also a great engineering workstation: We just published #1 and #2 OCUS benchmark results for PTC's Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire on Linux and it is an excellent CAE workstation for all of your engineering needs too. Plus, with the Sun N1 Grid Engine 6 software, you can let your workstation work 24 hours, 7 days a week, even if you're not sitting in front of it.
It's also a killer node for a high end visualization cluster if you run it with GeoWall2, Chromium, OpenSG Plus or OpenSceneGraph and I'm expecting to see many of these clusters soon.
Other people will probably Search for Aliens or do more useful stuff, such as folding proteins, break some cryptographic code or start an even more useful peer to peer project, maybe using JXTA.
But I'm sure that the collective whole of you, my readers, can come up with many more uses for such a workstation. So feel free to comment on this post and tell me what you would do with a Sun Java Workstation W2100z!
Update: (2004-07-26, 10:37 PM)
Oscar kindly pointed out that the W1100z and W2100z are not Sun's first x86 workstations in a comment
to this blog post. Sorry Oscar, of course you're right. I confess, I've only been 6 years at Sun, so that was before my
time... So, at least these are the first Opteron workstations from Sun and the first x86 workstations since a long time...
"What would you do with the fastest workstation on earth?" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
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