Win a BMW
To ruin a friendship, nothing like taking a long trip together or jointly owning a car. Way before Sun adopted the "Share" mantra I did the car sharing thing against all advice. Jim argued over lunch that front wheel drive was a ploy by car manufacturers to reduce assembly costs, and that good cars (Bimmers and Mercs) were rear wheel drive for a reason. Jim, my mentor, is articulate and hands-on in mechanical and electrical engineering. So off we went to see the first cheap BMW we saw on the paper, and off we bought it; 50/50. A 1977 gray market with a New York State salt rust terminal disease. We would work on it together, and alternate possession every Friday noon at our Checkpoint Charlie, the wafer fab parking lot.
We were too immersed in drivetrain catechism to notice the terminal rust. We gave it our best shot and fixed what we could. It gradually sunk in that the drivetrain would outlast the body. Engines wear with mileage while rusty shells wear with time, so we put mileage on the car as often as we could to balance its demise. Like eating fondue and finishing the bread and the cheese at the same time. Not easy. The car became a long distance cruiser for IEEE meetings on the east coast, and was also loaned to a moonlighting friend going through medical school. Became the rusty airport Limo at JFK. We squeezed nine years and untold miles with the cheese fondue strategy. Not exactly trouble free miles, but you learn more from old cars that break down than from new/reliable cars. We learned that electron losses are largely irreversible in metals, at least for car fenders. We also learned about sharing. Not as in giving a part of what you have, rather as in building trust by doing something together.
By the time I came to California the car was no longer safe to drive. I left it with Jim on Long Island, and never had the courage to ask if it was parted. But I saved the key for gimmicks, that is, ceremoniously placing the BMW key on the table as my wager on a bet. A riskless bet, mind you, given that the key was the only part of the car that didn't rust to pieces. The Win-a-BMW fad peaked a couple of years ago, when working on how to integrate networking into our Niagara processor.
The bet was to name an absolute invariant of how a new Sun system would be used, reminiscent of the generality issue of Walking with a limp. It is hard to know what apps the system would run, it is hard to exactly anticipate what OS type and release will host the apps, how storage will be attached to the system, or even to determine which instruction set (SPARC or Opteron) will dominate a particular deployment. Name the system invariant and win the BMW key.
The right answer is that the system will do IP over Ethernet for a living. Or in more formal terms, our systems are deployed presenting an application or a service through a network using the IP network layer over an Ethernet data link layer. Niagara 2 has integrated networking interfaces because when you do something for a living you'd better do it well. And these interfaces run at 10 Gigabits because, borrowing from Howard (mentor #2), a Niagara 2 does not deserve to be on Gigabit Ethernet.
Well, the same interface integration topic is coming up in the press since our Niagara 2 preview. Some of the industry debate is captured by this article.
I would be ready to interject the BMW key gimmick into this debate (offer void where prohibited), but for integrated networking I already disclosed my answer. Now, what is the question?
[ Technorati: NiagaraCMT, Solaris ]
Posted at 12:21AM Sep 14, 2006 by Ariel Hendel in Sun | Comments[1]
The unbearable lightness of being stateless
Ever gone through an ascetic period of feeling better by owning less? The lightness of moving to college with just a couple of bags, quitting a job and selling most possessions. No entanglements, no commitments. This lightness is not about travelling light, suitcases come with wheels nowadays. And it is neither about a hermit without belongings, nor a surf bum with or without waves. It is about a martial artist that cannot be disarmed, because he is the weapon, the comfort of a possession that cannot be taken away.
Here is the test. Take laptop, keys, passport, passwords, checkbook, credit card, and wardrobe. Stateless is being able to function again within a day of losing them all. You pass the test if you don't need all that stuff, or can recover the loss in short order. If the loss is a big setback, welcome to the club, and to the quotidian stress of preventing the loss.
We are doomed by modern life complexities to only experience the lightness of being stateless for few yet memorable periods. But modernity also helps, through centralization, for example. Using banks and ATMs rather than stuffing currency in mattresses and wallets. Similarly for data. Service providers and employers help keep our electronic data in presumably safer places than laptops or digital cameras. Modernity helps statelessness by delegating the storage and protection burden to somebody else.
On the flip side, the stateless road warrior became an endangered species through the overexploitation of the laptop. Personal and corporate lives go with them in their hard drives. There is no lightness there, unless of course the laptop is used as a communication device rather than a storage device. A thin client that kept its diet except for some data caching here and there.
The crux is feeling as light as travelling with no luggage yet avoid the deprivation of owning nothing. The essence of being stateless is knowing that whatever we carry isn't critical to our functioning, or can be easily recreated. Bad things happen, and it is all about how fast we recover. Same for infrastructure computer systems, that is, the systems that centralize our funds instead of stuffed wallets, the systems that centralize our data instead of lugging our lives on a laptop, and of course the systems that provide the wireless network cloud so we can be stateless yet always connected.
Systems based on CMT processors, like the UltraSPARC T1 processor, or the just previewed second generation 64 thread CMT Niagara 2 processor, can be viewed as horizontal scaling within a chip. And soon they will become domainable with the introduction of "Logical Domains". These Logical Domains can also experience the lightness of being stateless. But what burden of baggage can these domains possibly want to shed? What entanglements and possessions is a server stressed out about? The burden is the I/O, the data stored in disks, the observable behavior over network attachments, and the idiosyncracies of a modular I/O architecture. Without all these, servers are carefree souls.
The liberating part of Logical Domains is precisely that one can create surf bum domains that do not own any I/O, and in fact most domains in a CMT system will not own any I/O. These are not hermit domains crunching numbers away in seclusion, they are rather domains that rely on somebody else for I/O. They delegate the burden of I/O bus ownership, probing buses for devices, loading device drivers, and recovering when bad things happen; as they do happen. Applications and services can be hosted in multiple such stateless guest domains. And when bad things happen to a guest domain, they get back on their feet really fast, because they have no I/O bus topology to probe, and no I/O devices to initialize.
Early into this CMT blogging thread we claimed that a CMT system can mimic the attributes of discretely deployed horizontally scaled systems, now with Logical Domains it can surpass the master. It can sustain guests that lead an I/O stateless lifestyle. Every day.
Logical Domains are coming to SunFire T2000 and T1000 Servers among others. The free SunFire server trial program is in perfect harmony with the lightness of using a server without really owning it, let alone the path to Nirvana through sharing the details of some impressive use of the box.
[ Technorati: NiagaraCMT, Solaris ]
Posted at 09:20PM Sep 05, 2006 by Ariel Hendel in Sun | Comments[2]