Friday December 09, 2005
Sweet music for Sun's ears Nice article by Stephen Shankland over at c|net news.com today; Power could cost more than server, Google warns. Stephen found Google's concern over performance per watt in a September paper published at ACM's Queue, titled The Price of Performance - An Economic Case for Chip Multiprocessing written by Google engineer Luiz Andre Barroso. Luiz's footnote number #7 referenced the then future 32-thread Niagara chip as far off.
Well the Niagara was launched in volume this week as the Sun Fire T2000. I can only assume someone at Sun has put a T2000 in his hands. If not, Luiz, you can try one risk free for 60 days. I'm looking forward to his next paper titled, "Sun's UltraSPARC T1 CMP architecture solves Google's energy woes."
(2005-12-09 10:44:18.0)
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Tuesday December 06, 2005
My son and the T1 Today was such a momentus day for Sun that I wanted to share it with my son, Ian. He's a budding engineer at 5 1/2 years of age, fascinated by trains, space and Star Wars.
The two machines behind Ian were demonstrated at Austin's campus following our remote viewing of the webcast from New York. The T2000 was several times faster than the fully stocked Dell 6250 in an ldap authentication test. The most impressive feature of the demo was that both boxes were being monitored for their current draw. The Dell machine idled at 320 watts and climbed to 620 under full load. The T2000 idled at 220 and climbed to 250 under full load (all figures are from my memory).
I was really impressed during the webcast with an infrared image of a state of the art processor VS the UltraSPARC T1. The differential of heat across the various portions of the state of the art chip was 50 degrees celsius. The UltraSPARC T1 was a fairly uniform temperature at the cool end of the thermal spectrum in the image.
I love cool computers that are quiet. I hope the CMT revolution will trickle down to desktop processors soon. I have always owned Macs at home, which have always been quieter than PC's as they were based on cooler PowerPC processors. However, dissapointingly my latest Mac, the iMac G5, has a fan that spins up under higher loads. (2005-12-06 20:00:30.0)
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eBay loves it, Oracle adjusts licenses for it, PG&E rebates it, and more...
"It" is the UltraSPARC T1 (formerly Niagara) of course. The webcast of today's launch is packed with information not in the press releases. Here are my highlights.
eBay
Heather Peck, manager of the marketplace environment at eBay, who is responsible for the eBay's 6000-8000 servers was present at the launch event. eBay was the first customer to get a sneak peak at a T2000. Heather stated that they are done with building out new data centers every time they max out the space and power. She is an engineer by trade and as such she hasn't been excited about computer hardware developments in a number of years, but the T2000 has her and her team excited by opening their eyes to new possibilities due to its performance VS space/power economics. This is THE news I was looking for today.
Oracle
Oracle will sell licenses for the UltraSPARC T1 at 0.25 per core, which means an 8 core T1 will be licensed as a 2 CPU machine. An Oracle engineer said the first look at their in house performance test "pinned his ears back".
Pacific Gas & Electric
PG&E is going to be offering a rebate program for people who deploy UltraSPARC T1 systems. That is a surprise announcement to me. That means we really got the eco-responsibility message out there.
Electronic Data Systems
An EDS representative reported that they took out 48 rack units and replaced with 4 rack units of Ultrasparc T1 systems and cut the power from 5000 watts to 800.
Sun Sim Datacenter
Sun has developed a configurator to enable customers to simulate their workloads along with the space, power and cooling consumption in order to compare the reduction in monthly spend when replacing their systems with UltraSPARC T1 servers. You can learn about and download the Sim Datacenter here.
(2005-12-06 12:25:24.0)
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Monday December 05, 2005
Great Expectations A quick search for "Niagara Processor" on news.google.com reveals a couple stories this afternoon on what I'm calling, Niagara's Eve, in the spirit of multiple advents in December 2005. IT World Canada seems to be celebrating with me: Great expectations on eve of Sun's Niagara announcements. The EE Times CommsDesign even throws in some news about Niagara 2 in its piece, Sun's multithreaded Niagara servers flow and read Chris Rijk's ever informed commentary on the article.
I'm also hearing through personal grape vines that Niagara (offically UltraSPARC T1) is renewing interest outside of Sun among Electrical Engineers throughout the industry. Putting your ear to the rail hasn't been this much fun in years. (2005-12-05 14:51:09.0)
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Thursday December 01, 2005
Participating in two advents this December 
Twenty-three days left in the Christmas advent calendar. Five days left in the advent of Sun's next generation UltraSparc systems. For other's of you eagerly awaiting the arrival of energy, space and cost efficient computing, Sun is providing a Konfabulator countdown widget.
(2005-12-01 10:57:31.0) Permalink Comments [1]
