One of the greatest virtues any computer operating system can have is simple stability. So you really don't want to mess with the thing if you don't have to.
"If you mess with the operating system and get it wrong, the whole machine goes down," notes Mick Jordan, a senior staff engineer in Sun Labs.
As a result, he says, the pace of innovation at the level is necessarily a bit slower. People are reluctant to experiment, and rightly so.
Until now.
"People are already getting lost in this amount of complexity," he says.
The good news is that network servers can be tuned to do pretty much anything we ask them to do. The bad news? What we want from them tends to change in ways we can't always predict.
"The only thing people can do now to make these systems work well is to set by hand multitudes of different parameters and policies," Vengerov says.
But they can never be sure that those parameters and policies are really the best, because the environment is so often in flux.
A researcher in Sun Labs, Vengerov is part of an emerging consensus that large-scale systems need to be self-managing and self-optimizing. What sets him apart are his algorithms and his experience in applying them to complex real-world problems.
Cristina Cifuentes says her latest research project started with a simple observation: Sun has a lot of programmers writing a lot of code, but they don't use bug-checkers. Though any number of tools are available, they have proved to be far too slow, taking as much as a week to run. So Cifuentes began the Parfait project. The result? A bug-checker that can analyze 8 million lines of code in 20 minutes. That's right, 20 minutes.
The story of Project Portmeirion begins over a cup of tea.
Mario Wolczko, whose name suggests his heritage (Italian mother, Ukrainian father), was born and raised in England and still buys loose leaf tea by the kilo. Every day at 3 p.m. he brews a pot for his colleagues in Sun Labs, and on one of those occasions he and Greg Wright, who is also British, hit upon an idea.
"We had worked together for a number of years on a project that was trying to bring hardware support to the world of Java, and even though we'd come up with what we thought were interesting schemes, we were having an unsuccessful time getting the SPARC designers to adopt any of it," Wolczko recalls. "The conclusion was their lives are difficult enough already. Then we come along and offer them something that has, potentially, a lot of upside, but also a lot of risk."
Exactly what they didn't need.
So, over a number of tea times, Wolczko and Wright began to talk about how they might address that problem – the increasingly complex task of designing and testing microprocessors.
Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit
understand the fear that keeps people in the high-tech industry awake
at night -- the fear that computers will become like washing machines.
"When you buy a washing machine you keep it until it breaks," Herlihy
says. "You don't trade it in every two years for a better model because
next year's washing machine isn't going to be significantly better than
this year's model."
So, are these two Sun researchers -- part-time members of the Scalable Synchronization Research Group in Sun Labs -- saying that Moore's Law has run its course? Are they saying that computers will no longer become twice as fast every year or every year and a half?
Laurent Daynes has been working on a different kind of virtual machine — a multitasking virtual machine — and so far the results have been impressive.
Unlike humans who are less efficient when they try to multitask, the MVM shines when running many applications at once.
For one thing, it can cut startup time in half.
For another, it runs multiple applications with a much smaller footprint than the current VM.
Nicole Yankelovich watches and learns.
"That's really the way I like to work," she says. "Let the problems emerge."
A 17-year Sun veteran, Yankelovich is currently principal investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project in Sun Labs. Simply put, it's her job to find better ways for a widely dispersed workforce to work together.
Yankelovich became a practitioner in user experience research before the field was even designated as such, and through successive projects -- Intermedia, Shared Shell, Awarenex, Sun Labs Meeting Suite, and now Project Wonderland -- Yankelovich has helped define the field. More
Marten Mickos was not eager to join the upstart database company run by his friends and former classmates.
“I would always say to them: 'Why don't you guys get real jobs?'” he recalls.
Creating an open-source database seemed almost silly to him then. After all, he told his friends, the world is full of databases.
That was in 1995.
“Then I joined a database company myself and said, 'Hey, you haven't got a chance. We will take down Oracle. We have funding, we have a business, we have more developers.'”
But by 1997, he found himself sending an email to David Axmark and Monty Widenius, the founders of MySQL, saying, 'Hey, guys, you're getting some traction!'”
They saved the email.
Eric Arseneau likes to think small. Very small.
"I'm trying to go to as small a machine as possible," says the software engineer.
No problem. That's been the trend in technology, right? Smaller, faster, cheaper. All that must work in his favor.
Not so fast.
I would like to see Java running on something that has 16K of flash memory and a few bytes of RAM," Arseneau explains.
That's a much different frame of reference than someone doing, say, desktop programming.
Arseneau's target? The microcontrollers embedded in all kinds of things -- wrist watches, electric shavers, toys, toasters, greeting cards, environmental sensors. More
Chris
Oliver is nothing if not honest and plain spoken. For
years he was the lone coder behind a project that would become
JavaFX,
though at the time he was calling it F3 to signify form follows
function. His
motivation? "To
be honest," he says, "the motivation was I couldn't get
along with my boss." This
was at SeeBeyond, a company doing business integration software (a
company that would soon be acquired by Sun). More
Rick Hetherington has reason to feel good. In the high-risk business
of developing microprocessors, he and the team have been on a roll. Hetherington, you see, is chief technology officer in Sun's
Microelectronics group and has been responsible for driving the
company's innovative approach to processor design. Namely, chip
multithreading, or CMT. "We started out with 32 threads in 2005 ... and here we are in 2008 -- just three years later -- and we're up to 256 threads," he says. More
Sometimes the distance between success and failure can be measured in microns. The only way to make up the difference: Think differently. Take Proximity Communications, for example. Engineers in Sun Labs have shown that this innovative approach can be used to transfer data between chips at incredible speeds. We're talking terabytes per second. All you have to do is make sure the chips are carefully coupled for wireless communication. "We know proximity signaling works. They've tested it in the lab," says Distinguished Engineer Jack Cunningham. "But those test have been done with nanopositioning equipment to align the chips within the tolerances required." The problem is current manufacturing techniques aren't that precise. Which is why Cunningham is working on a whole new paradigm for semiconductor packaging. More
For Olaf Manczak, it starts with the numbers. He looks around and sees there are thousands of mainframes, millions of servers, and billions of consumer devices.
Then it becomes a question of complexity. To operate a datacenter you have to be highly educated and well trained. Consumer devices, on the other hand, are easy to use.
This is true, Manczak notes, even though consumer devices -- mobile phones, wireless routers, TV set-top boxes, and more -- contain embedded computers running some pretty sophisticated software. In fact, the operating system inside is often the same as (or derived from) what you'd find in many servers.
"Yet, with all these consumer gadgets one never has to go through the tedious process of installing software, creating configuration files, or applying updates," he says. "At most, one has to upgrade the firmware."
You see where this is going, right? Manczak wants to bring some of the simplicity of consumer electronics to datacenter servers.
And he's getting a little closer every day. More
Ashok Krishnamoorthy finds himself on the cusp of a dream.
He's leading an ambitious research project that aims to bring light speed (rather than wire speed) to microprocessors.
How? Through a combination of materials science, quantum mechanics, silicon photonics, and an optical extension to Proximity Communications, Sun's wireless chip-to-chip I/O technology.
The promise is so great that the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Sun $44 million to fund the project over the next five and a half years. More
