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Monday October 15, 2007

Alec Muffett and the TeraPods
Alec has published his CEC presentation. And while I never actually made it to any of this year's breakouts, I doubt that many were as insightful, thought provoking and downright amusing as this one was. It's also very well put together; must have taken quite a bit of effort. I was impressed that even though I'm watching it on my Solaris box, throughout the entire 40 minutes the audio and video stayed in sync; whether that's down to the latest Flash V9 plug-in, the blip.tv hosting service or something else, I don't know.

As an aside, the way it was presented reminded me of the classic Bob Dylan video for Subterranean Homesick Blues (and Weird Al Yankovic's superb parody of it). As Alec pointed out, the deck of cue-cards required would have been enormous, but I may just have had an idea for next year's Video Challenge...

Oh, and Alec Muffett and the TeraPods would be a great name for a rock band.

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Tags: suncec2007

Thursday October 11, 2007

Home from Vegas
Finally home from Vegas after a busy week. US Airways Flight 160 was delayed by almost an hour so i caught up on email and listened to some podcasts. If you didn't check out the CEC Podcasts you should.

Had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba last night with a bunch of Europeans, including Dave Levy, Mike Ramchand, Eric Bezille, Mathias Pfützner and Chris Gerhard. Chris had some interesting comments on CEC so I thought I'd address a few of them.

Use Sun Ray 2s with the vpn firmware installed so that they can be punched into Sun.
Couldn't agree more. I hadn't heard about this until a few days ago; when I did I contacted the group that were supplying the hardware. This group supplies all of Sun's trade shows and has a huge warehouse full of kit in Milpitas. It turned out that CEC clashed with a storage conference in Denver, and their limited number of SunRay 2s were already committed to that event. Also we had requested 150 SunRays and I don't believe they have 150 SunRay 2s. Hopefully next year there won't be a clash and by then maybe they'll have more SunRay 2s anyway.

I have to say, setting up the SunRays was really easy this year. The SunRay team have done a great job making utadm so much simpler and reliable than before. It did fail on two of the servers - the SunRays got the firmware update but then did not restart properly, but utadm -d followed by utadm -a cleaned it up nicely.

Put the Sun Rays into a FOG so that if a Sun Ray server goes down the individual Sun Rays are still usable.
This sounds like a good idea. I wish I'd had more time to work with the SunRays beforehand; unfortunately I didn't get out of hospital until a couple of days before the servers had to be shipped, so everything was kind of rushed. Hopefully next year I'll have more time and can talk to some SunRay experts to find out the best way to configure them.

Have some Sun Rays in Paris near the main conference room.
It's an interesting idea, and while I agree in principle I'm not sure how it would work. At conventions like JavaOne they line the corridors with them, but that's not really practical in a hotel, and certainly not one like Paris/Bally's. They have to be in a room that can be properly secured; as I mentioned in an earlier post several bits of equipment did go missing despite our best efforts at security. So while I agree with you, I wouldn't hold your breath.

It would be good if the content builder did not give times for the presentations. Simply allows users to choose the top 20 presentations that they wish to attend numbering them 1 to 20. Then get the computer to work out the room allocations such that we get the best allocation of slots.
Interesting idea. You're never going to please everyone (believe it or not I actually worked on a program like this on a Commodore PET over 25 years ago. It was to handle school class timetabling issues and won me the School Prize for Applied Computing - a 5 quid book token that I spent on a copy of The Vic Revealed).

I have to say, I always find the Schedule Builder program a pain in the arse to use. It wasn't quite so bad this year because no sessions were repeated, but still.

More deep technical presentations for those of us who are that way inclined.
You need to take that up with the selection committee. However the big problem is that you're always limited to the set of papers that are proposed.

Have the party somewhere that can easily cope with the numbers rather than somewhere that can't.
Amen.

The other thing that we really need to think about next year is the issue of power in the breakout rooms and general session rooms.

If you have any other thoughts feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get them to the right people.

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Tags: suncec2007

Wednesday October 10, 2007

CEC Videos: America

Here's a montage of photos that I took over the past week. Enjoy.

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Tags: razorlight suncec2007

Closing Session
Dan Berg keeps banging on about Second Life. Apparently it's been very popular. Granted it's very pretty, but I still don't get it.

Chat show featuring representatives from EBay, EDS, Microsoft and Fox pontificating on "the end of computing as we know it". But it doesn't seem to be capturing the attendees' interest - the room is half empty and a lot of people are walking out.

Don Grantham. I didn't realise he was British. Lots of rah-rah: The stock is up, we are delivering on our commitments, we are growing and making profits at last. We're on track to make 10% margin in FY09 as promised. The room is getting emptier; this should have been yesterday's session with Jonathan closing it out.

He also spoke about Sun Connection and how important it is - that's two major plugs in general sessions. He even mentioned SRS :(

Here we go, he's about to say what the plan is for next year - he's signed the contract to hold it in Las Vegas again next November. He wasn't specific as to exactly where - will it be here at Paris/Bally's again? Probably; I'll try to find out. I admit I'm ambivalent about that - on the one hand Vegas is a good location, I've had a great time, and I love that it takes just moments to walk from my room to the various sessions, but on the down side security has been a nightmare simply because (as I think I blogged earlier) it's not just a hotel, it's a massive hotel that's open 24x7 and actively encourages people to wander in. We've had equipment go missing and all kinds of technical issues specifically caused by not being in a true convention centre.

Update:Dan confirmed - same place.

I have no idea who put together the closing video, but I'm sure he's on crystal meth. I've never seen so many speeded-up clips and ultra-fast zooms and pans - I thought I was watching a Blipvert. I'm surprised that nobody had a seizure or exploded.

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Best Video!
SWEET! SysNet scooped the Best video award!

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Party at the Palms
Well, that was disappointing. It took 45 minutes to get there, only to find that the place was insanely cramped and the lines for the drinks and food were endless. The cover band were so loud that conversation was impossible - SMS was the best option for communication. Once I squeezed into Rain things got a little better; a few video games set to free play, shorter lines for the bar (the red wine was undrinkable) and food (very bad Taquitos and chips) and slightly better entertainment; some guy playing with a flaming sword, but that was about it. I bailed very early and went to dinner with friends. I hope that things improved after I left, but somehow I doubt it.

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Tags: palms party suncec2007

Tuesday October 09, 2007

Joined up thinking
As we all know, the message went out: Bring your laptops to CEC, there will be wireless. Sure, there's wireless; there are at least three access points in the General Session area, and Sun is paying a ridiculous amount for it. But where's the power? My laptop battery won't last an hour without dying.

Yeah, nobody thought about that. There are just four (I counted them) wall outlets in the ballroom - you need to get there early. So I thought it might be a good idea to run power to a few rows of seats - we have some 30' contractor grade power cords from last year. All we need to do is decide where to put them, right?

Wrong. If the organisers want to do anything official then the electrical contractors have to do it; they have to supply the cables, tape them down and charge us for the power. Given that there's only one general session left it simply isn't worth it. I must remember to raise this issue next year before the damn thing starts. Of course if attendees are using the wall outlets, that's a seperate matter entirely.

On a completely unrelated note, I happen to have four power strips in my laptop bag. Just in case I need them for anything.

UPDATE: Turns out I was being too harsh. It was just a matter of getting to talk to the right person. There WILL BE POWER in the last General Session after all - the hotel is running 100 amps with power strips along the far wall, to the right as you face the stage. Huge props to Atilla from conference organisers GPJ and Brian from the Hotel staff for arranging this.

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Tags: suncec2007

Blogging at CEC

Me and Thomas Wagner blogging at the Product Launch. No, I'm not asleep - I'm at the back of the hall trying to see John Fowler.

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Product Launch
Another first for CEC - a worldwide product launch. John Fowler announcing three T2 based systems: the T6320 Blade module and the T5120 and T5220 rack mount systems. They look pretty sweet. 8 cores (64 threads) and 64Gb memory, 10 Gig ethernet, hardware crypto, world record performance.

Filling a 48 blade rack with T6320s gives you over 3,000 threads! Yow!

The only real differences between the T5120 and T5220 are the height; the T5220 supports more disks and PCI cards, so consequently has higher rated PSUs, and has bigger (and thus more reliable) fans.

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Tags: suncec2007

General Session 2
Dave Douglas talking about Eco Responsibility. This is the first time I've heard him speak. It's very encouraging; Sun is improving energy efficiency both in our products and our data centres. Apparently our new Santa Clara data centre is very impressive; PG&E gave us a huge rebate for energy efficiency. I must get a tour when I get home.

We are getting to the point that computers cost more to run than they do to acquire. Interesting Q&A session; wish it could have been longer, but now it's time for the main event.

Jonathan Schwartz He gave a plug for the Sun Connection web site. Brief shot of the webcast in Second Life; looks like there are a few people there. Everyone looks very fit; guess that's the attraction - in Second Life you aren't old fat and ugly. You can even have huge black wings, apparently. Dan says there are 1,000 people in there but I can only see about thirty.

Nice rant against the NetApp lawsuit. It will be interesting to see how that pans out since Sun has such a massive patent portfolio.

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Tags: douglas keynote schwartz suncec2007

Monday October 08, 2007

Crisis? Which crisis?
Now I remember why it's a bad idea to hold CEC in a hotel. For the last few years we've held it at proper convention centres - either in Denver or San Francisco. The key benefit is that at the end of the day you lock down the entire building - everyone leaves except for a few security guards and the chances of random bits of hardware suddenly evolving into more mobile life forms are greatly diminished. In a hotel, it's much trickier - especially in a hotel that actively encourages people to stay up all night and to come in from outside. As a result, all the systems have to get locked away at the end of the day and replaced first thing in the morning.

That in itself is a headache, but then you have to factor in the static (we are in a desert) which has fried at least three of our Ultra 20s so far and the issues that we had with the NVidia cards vs the projectors. It's been a huge headache

Yesterday the network in the pavillion was up and down like a kid on a trampoline. Today it was the turn of the wireless. Apparently they aren't used to having 3,000+ geeks, all with WiFi enabled devices, descending on the place.

Then there are the issues with people needing SWAN access. It was supposed to have been explained to people that if they needed to register for punchin before they came here, but I guess the message didn't get out. Then the Broomfield punchin point stopped responding at a critical time. Oh what fun.

As if that wasn't enough, one of the SunRay servers died on me. The damn thing wouldn't even reboot. So now I've replaced it we no longer have a backup. I hope none of the others fail. In the meantime, it seems that trying to use rsync to keep the servers synchronised was not such a good idea after all. It worked OK in testing, but in production each sync takes ages. So I'm switching back to the idea of using one of the servers as an NFS server which I should have done in the first place.

Yeah, Vegas is a fun place, but there's definitely something to be said for the Moscone centre. The hot rumour is that next year they may try to hold it in Europe. I hope it's somewhere with a good convention centre. Anywhere but Birmingham NEC would be fine by me.

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Tags: suncec2007

Why doesn't scp let you set the timeout?
As happens every year there's content that needs to be pushed to all the Ultra 20s that the presenters are using. Since I didn't get chance to configure them beforehand I haven't configured scp at all - no key exchange, no PermitRootLogin or anything. And since we are using DHCP I have no way of knowing whether the target box is an Ultra 20, a laptop or some other box. It's bad enough that I have to enter passwords each time, but if the remote box doesn't respond for some reason scp doesn't time out, it just hangs. Damn it. Why isn't there an option to set the timeout on the command line?

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General Session 1
Dan Berg banging the drum for CE2.0 - it's going to be available "on the edge" - translation, outside SWAN. Good idea - looks like it's going to be useful.

Jim Baty talking about Red Shift - missed most of it talking to Atilla. The wireless is being flaky again. Thankfully it's up now; I'm logged in, but the guy sat next to me couldn't.

Mark Tremblay talking about chip multi-threading. Interesting question: would you rather have a system that burns 500W peak and 100W idle or 400W peak and 200W idle? Given that most systems are idle something like 90% of the time the former might make more sense, but when all your systems are active at the same time, how do you power and cool them? With advances in virtualization the emphasis is on reducing that 90% - keeping the systems running at peak whenever possible. So the correct answer really is, whichever one I need fewer of.

Andy Bechtolsheim - Employee #1. Why are people leaving? This is the headline act!. He's talking about the new X4450 - 16 cores, 128Gb, 8 disks, eating 1050W in a 2U box. Mark, I have my answer - I want one of those. Nice that we will continue to support both Intel and AMD CPUs.

The 6048 blade server looks awesome: 48 blades - 192 sockets, 6 terabytes of memory - in one rack. Plus some interesting sounding I/O stuff coming down the pipe next year.

Thumper with terabyte disks and redundant disk controllers? Yikes!

Damn, video issues in room Bronze 1 - I have to bail while he's talking about the TACC supercomputer.

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Tags: suncec2007

Sunday October 07, 2007

Neat new twitter feature
Apparently Twitter has added a new Tracking feature. Now you can track tweets that contain certain keywords even if you aren't following the person who is tweeting. I'm tracking cec2007 and suncec2007 to see how well it works.

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Tags: suncec2007 twitter