Innovation Blog

The periphery of most systems contains a number of optical interconnects for connecting between boxes and racks of servers. But optical technologies haven't really penetrated inside the systems – until now. As part of a partnership with DARPA on the UNIC program, Sun is working to develop innovative technologies that will significantly lower the barrier to entry for optics.

Via research in inter-chip optics, (otherwise known as nanophotonic interconnects), Sun is working to solve interconnect problems that arise deep inside the box at the chip level by developing high-density optical interconnects with low power, transmit receipt circuits, and the ability to communicate over much longer distances with lower electrical signaling.

Joining Hal Stern, Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, on this edition of Innovating@Sun are Distinguished Engineers from Sun's Microelectronics Group, Ashok Krishnamoorthy and Jack Cunningham. The interview includes discussion around:

Highly-virtualized environments offer efficiencies and flexibility, but also come with ever-increasing modes of complexity, thereby increasing the challenges faced by managers in these environments. Sun's Dynamic Infrastructure initiative provides a complete set of technologies and services that leverage automation and virtualization technology to assist in the creation of agile, secure Web services environments. Joining Hal Stern for this latest edition of Innovating@Sun, are Distinguished Engineer, Vice President, and Chief Architect for Global Sales and Services, Dr. Jim Baty, and Jason Carolan, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect. Throughout the interview, the trio covers:

• What dynamic infrastructure is
• How dynamic infrastructure manages the tension between flexibility and excess complexity with virtualization
• Getting resources deployed faster and better than the competition
• Basic rules for defining dynamic infrastructure pods
• The calculus of continuous configuration
• How the definition of who does what changes
• Dangers inherent in so much automation technology
• Virtualization, efficiency, and the greening of the datacenter as a process

Links:

Transcript
Dynamic Infrastructure website
OpenxVM website

Fixed content data is growing exponentially. And when you're considering billions of records, you need an easy way to find what you're looking for. Traditional file system technology is not going to cut it. An entirely different paradigm is required to address these needs - and that is what the StorageTek 5800 System (a.k.a. Project Honeycomb) is architected for. And what's more exciting, the system's software technology is now opensourced – a first in the area of storage.

Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, welcomes Josh Dobies, software engineering manager, to this latest edition of Innovating@Sun. Stern and Dobies discuss the strategy and functionality behind Sun's latest distributed software technology that can turn standard commodity hardware into a highly-reliable, scalable, easy-to-manage storage cloud with an object-oriented paradigm. The interview covers:

Just how far can Java be pushed in the micro-embedded space? That's what Eric Arseneau, principal investigator of the Squawk virtual machine and his team want to know. With the goal of being “as invisible as possible”, in order to enable multitudes of companies to do multitudes of things, Arseneau is looking beyond Sun SPOTs to targets devices like SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) cards and similar devices running approximately 16K of Flash and 2K of RAM.

Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, welcomes Arseneau to this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to delve deeper into the possibilities in the embedded world thanks to technology such as Project Squawk. The interview includes:

Fortress 1.0, Sun's new programming language for high-performance computing, is all about opening up scientific domains for writing code – domains that have previously been inaccessible to the average programmer. Dr. Eric Allen, principal investigator in the Programming Language Research Group at Sun Labs, joins Hal Stern on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to elucidate the features and benefits of Fortress. Allen and Stern discuss:

One of the challenges with virtualization today is implementing it in such a way that the needs of both the CIO and CTO are met. Oftentimes, this isn't the case. Joining Hal Stern, vice president of Global Systems Engineering, on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun, is Dr. Rick Zippel (photo), vice president of Advanced Technology in Sun Labs. Zippel and Stern discuss Project Caroline and why virtualization goes beyond hardware to become more of a systems play, thereby making rapid deployment a function of virtualization - rather than greater utilization or efficiencies. Highlights of the discussion include:

Continuing to expand its horizons, Solaris is moving in new directions. Via Project Pulsar, Sun is porting an OpenSolaris kernel to the PowerPC architecture and additionally, is beginning development on moving Solaris to an embedded operating system, also on PowerPC.

Principal Investigator in Sun Labs on the Pulsar Project, Tom Riddle, joins Hal Stern, Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, for this latest edition of Innovating@Sun. Here, Stern and Riddle discuss:

A bit of old school OS theory, combined with virtualization technology, comes together to create a robust migration plan for Solaris 8 customers looking to move to Solaris 10. With an eye toward protecting customers' technology investment as well providing a path of migration, the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant offers innovative technology to help customers along this path. Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, welcomes two guests to this newest edition of Innovating@Sun. Joost Pronk, product manager for virtualization in the Solaris group and Dan Price, staff engineer and lead on the containers project in the Solaris kernel group join Hal to discuss:

On 11/12/07, Sun announced new systems designed to address the extreme computation, scale, and storage requirements of high-performance computing (HPC) customers. Sun Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, invites Solaris Engineering's distinguished engineer, Josh Simons, to this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to double click on the benefits and rationale behind these innovative new technologies. Stern and Simons discuss:

The social network indeed continues to modulate and inform the educational network as can be seen by the thousands of learning communities coming together through Moodle – an open source learning management system.

Moodlerooms is a service provider for the worldwide education market, offering services, support, and hosting for Moodle. Stuart Sim, CTO, Chief Architect, and Founder of Moodlerooms, joins VP of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun. The conversation between Stern and Sim covers:

Leveraging common components to deliver uncommon results is a cornerstone of the innovative design strategy for Sun's latest systems offering record performance, utilization, energy efficiency and system life.

In this episode of Innovating@Sun, VP of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, welcomes Chief Architect of Sun's Systems Group and co-founder of the company, Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim's talent for predicting where technology is converging and what the critical elements of design need to be is a hallmark of the products that have arisen from his work. Andy shares his thoughts on the current state of computing as well as the future in this latest podcast. Topics include:

Technologies and architectures for the future datacenter interconnect will have significantly higher performance requirements than they do today, mandating an overhaul in the thinking and research being done in this area. Such thinking is underway at Sun Labs. Hans Eberle (photo), distinguished engineer in Sun Labs, joins Hal Stern, vice president of Global Systems Engineering on this edition of Innovating@Sun, to discuss “proximity communication” - a packaging technology for interconnecting chips. The two discuss how proximity communication works, focusing on:

The notion prevails that handling tens or even hundreds of terabytes of data is difficult. But here to dispel that notion is Luke Lonergan, CTO and and co-founder of Greenplum who joins Vice President of Global Systems Engineering at Sun, Hal Stern on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun.

As a leader in high-performance database software for Business Intelligence, Greenplum enables enterprises to quickly access massive volumes of critical data for in-depth analysis with a solution built on open source. Stern and Lonergan discuss:

Scaling up to support the hundreds of thousands, even millions of users playing massive online games is an ongoing industry problem. The goal with Sun's Project Darkstar is to provide an infrastructure that lets people write massive multiplayer online games that can scale dynamically, while not being required to change their programming model.

Jim Waldo, distinguished engineer, principal investigator at Sun Labs and chief architect of Project Darkstar, joins Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern for a podcast that highlights how Project Darkstar addresses the issues with massive multi-player online games. Listen in to hear about:

There's no question the world needs computing to get to where it wants to go. It's hard to think of a sustainable world not having more optimized computing than it does today. But the way we build computers, storage, networking, and datacenters today is not sustainable, thus creating opportunities for innovators to gain competitive advantage in the area of energy efficiency.

Sun's Vice President of Eco Responsibility, Dave Douglas, joins Hal Stern for this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss the lowdown behind the industry's latest buzzword “eco-responsibility”.

Core to the discussion is energy and what options exist for enterprises that are running out of space, power, and cooling in their datacenters. In particular, the pair discuss:

The swelling network tide of customers, devices, and business around the globe is putting increasing pressure on vendors to deliver servers with more performance, more network bandwidth, more pervasive security, and more threads. For server vendors, the challenge is meeting all of these requirements within increasingly constrained space and power envelopes. The UltraSPARC T2 processor (code-named Niagara 2) was designed to build on the success of its predecessor, the UltraSPARC T1, and to address these challenges head-on. By scaling performance through threading, and integrating networking, security, and I/O onto the processor itself, the UltraSPARC T2 delivers more throughput, performance, and functionality per watt than any processor in its class.

Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern met with Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Sun Microelectronics, Rick Hetherington to discuss this latest silicon innovation from Sun. Topics covered include:

When it comes to accessing content and services from a device, phones are a tool of choice, limited though they may be. The phonetop concept looks at enabling consumers to access the content they want across any device, but in a manner that works with the specific characteristics of a phone.

Enter JavaFX Mobile – a complete mobile operating and application environment built around Java and Linux open source technologies that allows developers to build rich, high-impact applications using JavaFX script.

JavaFX Product Line Manager Jacob Lehrbaum joins VP of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, on this edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss this latest technology in the world of advanced converging mobile devices. Highlights include:

Network.com, Sun's network-accessible grid platform, just became a whole lot more available. On the geographic front, it's now available outside the U.S. in many other countries including Canada, China, Japan, India, Singapore, and many countries within the E.U.

This newly-expanded availability goes beyond new points of access to include wider availability of the platform in terms of what it can do. Group product manager for Network.com, Rohit Valia, met with Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern, to discuss the new and exciting features in detail. A key goal of the Network.com expansion is to reach developers in new ways and expand their development options on the grid. Listen to the podcast to learn about:

Keeping your services alive and available in the face of a myriad of disasters could prevent millions of dollars in business losses. In the event that your applications, systems or datacenter experiences a catastrophic failure, Solaris Cluster can ensure 24/7 access to all services. And now, the technology supporting that disaster recovery is available via open-source, allowing developers to quickly and regularly target new problems and scenarios.

Hal Stern, Vice President of Global Systems Engineering welcomes Keith White, Director of Availability Engineering to this edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss the details around the open sourcing of Solaris Cluster and how multiple parties within the ecosystem will benefit. Highlights include:

Furthering the promise of “write once, run anywhere”, Sun's exciting new product family, called JavaFX, is enabling developers to build compelling, rich user interfaces that leverage Java for a wide spectrum of devices.

Sun CTO Bob Brewin joins Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to chat about the software technologies driving the evolution of integrated rich clients – namely, clients in a plethora of screen formats from TVs to in-dash car systems to webtops, all leveraging the services and content available on the Internet.

The Java FX family with JavaFX Script allows developers to write in a consistent, standard, declarative scripting language, targeting devices in the same manner, regardless of what platform they’re deploying to. Notable points include:

New applications. New devices. Convergence. An explosive network effect. And all of it requiring more security. This phenomenon requires ever-increasing advancements in the area of cryptography to protect information from brute force attacks.

Enter Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC), a stronger, more efficient technology than RSA, which, because of its mathematical foundation, consumes far less processing cycles thereby opening up a world of new opportunities.

Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, welcomes Sun Labs Distinguished Engineer, Vipul Gupta to discuss why ECC is stronger and more efficient than RSA and how it is being implemented today.

Key elements of the discussion include:

Today's mantra in entertainment is “the consumer is king” whereas historically, that mantra was “content is king.” Consumers today are demanding any content, any time, any place, on any device, and in any format, creating a paramount shift for content providers. Different device types require different content types and data rates, thus massive amounts of transcoding, processing, and storage.

Add to that the moving, tracking, and storing of content as it goes through its life cycle and you'll see tremendous pressure on the IO systems, networking systems, storage systems, and CPUs. With multiple forms of distribution, from traditional TV, to video-on-demand, to the Internet, to YouTube, iPods, and cellphones, the need to manage these digital formats is dire.

This latest edition Innovating@Sun brings together host Hal Stern, vice president of global systems engineering and guests Bob Sokol, media architect in global sales and services, and Dave Cavena (photo), systems engineer in the studio and postproduction part of Sun's business. The trio discuss the latest innovation in the area of digital media with particular focus on:

If you're the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) type, fun is guaranteed at the 2007 Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. This family-friendly event features everything - from arts and crafts to science projects and engineering, including robots, and even a "Silicon Death Valley", a graveyard of obsolete computer gear.

The Sun Microsystems booth is showing off with Sun SPOT - a platform that greatly simplifies Java development and experimentation with small wireless devices. Many visitors are absolutely mesmerized by the "gadgets" powered by Sun SPOTs, including Robot Sapiens, the Sun SPOT Trackbots, a Sun SPOT-based Morse code to semiphore translator. A true feast for geeks of all ages!

If you're interested in "programming the world", you can get the Sun SPOT Java Development Kit directly on the Sun SPOT website.

As a developer, wouldn't you love to stop thinking about time and start thinking about how you're optimizing your workload or responding to events? Wouldn't you love for someone to abstract all the nasty stuff underneath the APIs to allow you to think about the domain and application workload?

The Java Real-Time System 2.0, announced at JavaOne, does just that, offering real-time garbage collection and support for x86. Distinguished Engineer in the Client Software Group, Greg Bollella, joins Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, for the latest edition of Innovating@Sun.

Stern and Bollella discuss:

If you were not able to come in person to see the Sun Labs Open House 2007 at our Menlo Park Campus, check out the Sun Labs Virtual Tour and the great interviews with some of our best researchers.