Imagine you've set up your Project Blackbox datacenter to perform mission-critical tasks in a remote location. Wouldn't you want to know if it was opened, jarred unexpectedly, or if the temperature or humidity went too high? A myriad of things can happen when the systems are powered down that wouldn't be known to remote managers.
Enter Sun SPOT technology. Sun SPOTs (Small Programmable Object Technology), when implemented on Project Blackbox, can connect to a cell infrastructure or satellite and send data back to the customer as to what occurred while the systems were down, helping to shorten the lag time if an issue arises.
Sun Labs Researcher, Arshan Poursohi (photo), meets with Sr. VP of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, for the latest edition of Innovating@Sun to talk about the implementation of Sun SPOT technology on Project Blackbox. You'll hear about:
Location and theft management
Wireless technology keeping track of activities in a mobile datacenter
Why it's useful to have compute power close to sensor data
Swarm intelligence
What's coming out for mobile platforms at JavaOne 2007
Power management capabilities to extend battery power.
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Links:
Sun SPOT
Where's Project Blackbox
Sun SPOT Blog Entry: Bright Ideas Abound with Sun SPOTs
Running data on the grid is about to get a whole lot easier. Sun is proud to present the world's only application utility that enables on-demand delivery of HPC applications over the network. Called Sun Grid Application Catalog, and available through network.com, the utility offers immediate pay-per-use access to 20 unique open source applications with more expected from the 50-100 communities participating.
Vice President of Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, invites Vice President of Engineering for Collaboration and ISVs, Jim Parkinson, to this edition of Innovating@Sun to hear firsthand how ISVs, developers, and end users will benefit from the expanded grid functionality.
Parkinson notes that making applications available has been one of the challenges in utility computing. This new release addresses that in several ways by:
Allowing ISVs to deliver their HPC apps as a service over the network, thereby growing their business, better servicing existing customers and increasing revenue through innovative offers.
Offering the ability to access applications external to the grid. Called bi-directional, this allows users to open a port and talk to a website or database without moving all their content to the grid. This also allows long-running jobs to lie dormant until they need to be activated, saving time and money.
Giving users the mechanism to pull data out of a protected environment in the case of licensed applications, and do their CPU-intensive computing elsewhere.
Making it easier for developers to log on, create applications, and test them via a grid simulator.
“People don't care where their CPUs are, just their data,” says Parkinson noting how these efforts all serve to make the network more transparent. He adds that the ideal model is a network operation model as opposed to a datacenter model, but with the simplicity of pricing and contracts such that anyone can use it.
Note of Correction: In the podcast, a reference is made to the company, eHiTS. The correct company name is SymBioSys and their application is eHiTS.
Links:
network.com
Sun Grid website
SimBioSys'eHiTS
Press Release
Feature Story
Kris Thorleifsson's Blog
