Wednesday October 15, 2008

Chip Multi-Threading, Cooking and the Anatomy of a Viral Video

Here's a fun video about chip multi-threading, explained through cooking:

The Story

For those of you who don't speak German: Ingo, the hero of this movie, wants to cook German roulades. He uses his hands as registers, while his table serves as a level 1 cache. The instruction cache is his brain, where the recipe resides. Soon, he reaches the point at which it says: "Pour red wine into the pan". There's no red wine in the registers, no wine in the L1 cache, so he needs to ask his memory subsystem: "Hooooney, would you mind bringing me a bottle of Merlot from the basement, pleaaaase?"

While "honey", the memory subsystem, is busy bringing wine, Ingo explains that at this point, there's no difference whether he stirs the dish at 1.4 GHz, or at 4.5 GHz (this is the piece where his stirring gets frantic). Actually, he'd rather use his precious time to do other useful things with what he has in L1 cache already, for example cook dumplings, or prepare dessert. That would indeed help a lot in getting dinner ready sooner, even while waiting for "honey" to bring some wine.

And that is the whole point of chip multi-threading.

Now, imagine 8 Ingos, each with two hands (think pipelines) and doing 4 dishes per hand (read: threads). What a feast!

CMT Cooking Going Viral

I first saw Ingo giving this presentation in February, during Sun Germany's Partner University event. It was hilarious, the whole  room was laughing and we knew he needed to do it again. So, with the help of a few people, Ingo and Ulrike created this fun video.

They posted it on YouTube in July and we featured it on one episode of the HELDENFunk podcast for German system admins. Soon, Ingo reached a few hundred downloads and we thought: "Cool, we have a new fun video to share!"

Then, Alex Wunschel, aka the "Podpimp", one of the more well-known podcasters in Germany and a listener of the HELDENFunk podcast, twittered about Ingo's memory subsystem called "Schatz!" (the German equivalent of "honey"). That was even cooler.

Then, Thomas Knüwer saw Alex' Tweet, and blogged about it. On the "Handelsblatt" blog. Think something like "Fortune" Magazine in German. And he got 14 comments. Gulp. 

The result: Ingo's views skyrocketed, soon he was in the thousands, and last time I checked, he had more than 13,500 views, for a 3.5 minute video about chip multi-threading and a memory subsystem called "honey". Nice!

Today, Alec and I chatted about Ingo's video and apparently, he liked it very much. Well, I guess Ingo can start counting again. This time, english speaking viewers, too. Have fun!

Would you like Ingo to dub his video in English? Or do you prefer the German version? Just drop a comment below! 

"Chip Multi-Threading, Cooking and the Anatomy of a Viral Video" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-10-15 13:03:55.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
chip cmt cooking cpu marketing multi-threading niagara niagara2 ultrasparc video viral youtube
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [2]

Wednesday February 27, 2008

The UltraSPARC T2 Processor and Security

A couple of weeks ago, the Sun Partner University saw 250 technical people from Sun's german partner community gathering in Fulda, Germany. Besides showing videos, talking about Sun Visualization Software, the Sun Grid Engine and Sun Studio Compilers and evangelizing Web 2.0, I had the honor of recording an interview with Alec Muffett, one of our Principal Engineers, based in the UK.

Alec came to Fulda to talk about the Sun UltraSPARC T2 (aka Niagara 2) Processor (here are some systems to try out) and Security. You can listen to the interview he gave at the current episode #11 of the HELDENFunk podcast (if you don't understand german, start listening after the 2nd minute or so). Now, he also published a video he recorded of himself while he gave his presentation. A very worthwhile and fun 16 minutes to watch!

Notice the fun and refreshing style of his presentation and slides A true master of the Zen Arts of Presentation!

"The UltraSPARC T2 Processor and Security" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-02-27 08:05:14.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
cryptography niagara niagara2 security solaris sparc t1 t2 ultrasparc
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Monday October 01, 2007

New HELDENFunk Podcast Episode Featuring 3 Interviews (2 in English)

Today, the 3rd episode of the HELDENFunk podcast went live. And we now have a jingle, too! I'm glad we reached this milestone: If we can bring out three regular episodes of this podcast, we can do 10, then maybe 100...

Even if this podcast is mostly in german, there are two very interesting interviews in english:

• At (01:17), Dave Cavena talks about how hollywood companies archive their movies today (old-school warehouses like in the end scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark") and how that is going to change for the better (modern new tape archives that consume less space, work and yes, energy than warehouses). Read his fascinating white paper "Archiving Movies in a Digital World". Thanks to Dave, I'm now archiving all of my photos to SmugMug. It's interesting to see that just today, Jonathan announced a greater focus of Sun towards storage...
  
• At (19:50) we talk to Rick Hetherington, Sun Microelectronics CTO about Niagara 2 and the challenges behind designing processors for the future.

Of course, there's much more, albeit in german: Ulrich Gräf, OS Ambassador talks about Solaris 10 8/07 (update 4), we discuss Sun's newest servers based on Intel CPUs, the CFS acquisition, a nice case mod where one of our customers put a Solaris 10 server into his hand luggage, Solaris xVM and Project eTude and much, much more.

In fact, from episode 1 to 3, this podcast has ever increased in length. Maybe it's time to move to a bi-weekly schedule soon...

P.S.: If you understand german, make sure to participate in our sweepstake competition! 

"New HELDENFunk Podcast Episode Featuring 3 Interviews (2 in English)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-10-01 12:55:27.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
8/07 archiving brandz cmt containers digital heldenfunk movies news niagara2 podcast podcasting solaris storage update xvm zones
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Tuesday July 31, 2007

New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday, we've announced good financial results for the last fiscal year 07. Very good financial results. I like working for a profitable company, it makes so many things so much easier.

Tomorrow, I'm going to have a meeting with my managers to discuss what to do next. Since we're early in the new financial year 08, I'm thinking about what to do next. So, here are some new year's priorities for my FY08 at Sun:

• Web 2.0: I've been talking to customers, partners and Sun people in Germany about Web 2.0 a number of times. Every time, the feedback has been very clear: We want More! So I'm going to do more Web 2.0 related stuff: More blogging, podcasting, perhaps a successor to the now famous ZFS movie, more participation in social networking sites, including del.icio.us, XING and Facebook, more evangelizing and of course more insight into where this journey is headed to.
• Technology: Sun is all about technology. We create, apply and leverage technology to enable the participation age. (Did you know that we've proclaimed the participation age before Tim O'Reilly published his famous Web 2.0 article?)
  We've seen Niagara changing the rules of processor technology and building the backbone of the web, again, and we've already disclosed some information on Niagara 2. We've seen the Constellation System debut during ISC 2007. You may have noticed that the Sun Ultra 40 Workstation is the best workstation on the planet, and BTW, we're changing the economics of true Video-On-Demand Streaming as well, just to name a few favourite technologies on my list.
  The biggest problem to solve now is: Spreading the word. Let me explain. Whenever I participate in a Sun day (A customer meeting in which Sun people present on new Sun technologies), two effects consistently happen: First, more people than originally planned show up (I once had people join in over a video conference line). Second, the meeting takes much longer than originally anticipated, because customers want to hear so much more about our technologies.
  Since we don't have much money to spend on advertising, sponsoring or other forms of traditional awareness generation, we need to do a lot more of these Sun days, and talk to customers one by one. Is this more difficult and time-consuming? Yes. Does this have a more lasting effect than traditional marketing? You bet. Only by talking to the experts at our customers are we able to verify that what we do is right and make sure our technology meets the people that want/need/develop for/join/use/participate in it. In FY08, I'm going to participate in more Sun days and talk to as many customers about Sun technology as I can.
• Solaris: This may be a sub-topic of "Technology", but it really is a topic of its own: I use Solaris at home, on my laptop, evangelize it to customers, and it feeds my need as a computer scientist to learn about interesting things every day. In FY08, I'm going to use more new Solaris features at home and at work, write more about it (German readers: Check out this ZFS whitepaper), participate more in the OpenSolaris communities and make sure OpenSolaris gets the attention with developers, customers and partners that it deserves.

"New Year's Resolutions" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-31 14:17:55.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community niagara niagara2 open opensolaris opensource solaris sun system technology web2.0 work zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.