Friday Sep 28, 2007

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 replacement of wires used for chip interconnect with “capacitive coupling,” thereby avoiding the use of a printed circuit board
  • The physical restrictions of standard wire
  • Getting terabytes per second of interconnect bandwidth per square millimeter of chip overlap
  • How a contactless interconnect allows reworking of a multi-chip module
  • Emerging trends such as virtualization and consolidation that require a bandwidth-rich interconnect
  • The increasing criticality of moving data between nodes
  • Why more powerful interconnects are the key factor to homogenizing the datacenter
  • Energy usage impact

    And while all of this is currently in the research phase in Sun Labs, you can find updated information on proximity switching on Sun's research site.

    blogs.sun.com/innovation/resource/eberle.jpg" width="260" height="190" border="0" align="right" border="0">

    Links:



    Transcript
    Project Sedna Website
    Hans Eberle Profile



    • Posted at 03:05PM Sep 28, 2007 by Laura Ventura in Sun   [permalink]    

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    Monday Sep 24, 2007

    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:

  • Handling data warehousing using open source and open systems technology
  • How Greenplum revolutionized the deployment of a large number of disk drives by combining Sun Fire X4500 server with Solaris and ZFS to consolidate what would normally go into a SAN storage infrastructure into one 4U rack-mount box
  • Dealing with high levels of parallelism
  • The technology behind a dataflow engine that scales across thousands of CPUs transparently through SQL
  • How success was created from building on ideas of others in open source software packages and creating a product that commercializes those things and exposes a set of interfaces to non-experts in parallel programming
  • Making money from open source software
  • How innovation drove savings in floor space, cooling, and power consumption

    Find out today how combining innovation with an existing community allows for a ready-made audience and the opportunity for monetization.

    Links:



    Transcript
    Greenplum website
    Data Warehouse Appliance website



    • Posted at 06:40PM Sep 24, 2007 by Laura Ventura in Sun   [permalink]    

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