There is an interesting parallel between building Ferraris and building computers. Both require elements to make them very fast and very complex. Like computers, Ferraris have a lot of commodity components such as tires. But the way these components are put together and the resulting end system is what makes them unique. The high performance computing space is no different.
Sun's Director of Technology in the Global Systems Practice, Marc Hamiltons's Blog, meets with Hal Stern, vice president of global systems engineering, in this edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss the art of tying together commodity components to get the most compute, networking, and storage in the smallest space.
Hamilton and Stern discuss what the high-performance computing (HPC) market looks like today with a focus on how technical problems today needs more capacity than you can deliver on a single desktop. Highlights of the interview include:
What mechanisms in Solaris make it possible to scale with increased clustering
Market interest around HPC given that applications are expanding and becoming more data and network driven
Mitigating silent data corruption with ZFS
Accounting for hardware failures in your software architecture to reduce the frequency of system failures
Multicore chips that are increasing demands on the operating system
The ever-present issues of power and cooling and what new innovations address these
Fortress – a modern language for HPC programming
Links:
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Marc Hamiltons's Blog
Open MPI
X4500 storage server
Andy Bechtolsheim
Fortress
Guy Steele
For as long as technology innovations have occurred, higher-end technologies have eventually made their way into the mainstream, allowing wider groups of users to access functionality formerly only available to a select few.
Such is the case with security features in Solaris 10, now boasting capabilities formerly only available in Trusted Solaris versions of the operating system. VP of Systems Engineering Hal Stern welcomes Darren Moffat, Sr. Staff Engineer, and Glenn Brunette, distinguished engineer, to this edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss important security features of Solaris 10 that further enable enterprises to drive their business forward safely while allowing for a more open interchange with their customers and partners.
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Security is about how all of the products and processes fit together into a comprehensive ecosystem that protects a company's information and information assets – essentially the system. And the architecture for systemic security is based on a set of modular components, or micro patterns, that address a variety of security problems.
Hal Stern, VP of Systems Engineering welcomes Glenn Brunette, distinguished engineer, security expert, and fellow Jersey native to discuss the difference between systemic security and secure systems.
Brunette discusses how early on, architectural patterns were discovered from customer deployments. This led to the ability to instantiate the patterns with a variety of products and services based on individual customer requirements while maintaining the integrity of the security architecture.
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