In his blog yesterday, Jonathan provides some insight into the progress Sun has made in High Performance Computing. 

Money quote: "and last, but certainly not least - if you'd like to try a supercomputer on an hourly basis, just point your browser to network.com... we've made a ton of progress in the past 6 months..." 

We're currently running a special promotion right now. Anyone who signs up for Network.com receives 200 free CPU hours!
 

Here is a screen shot of a phone running the JavaFX Mobile software we announced today.  Looks cool.  I believe this may be the technology that will enable handset vendors compete with the upcoming iPhone from Apple.  While the two phones look similar, there is a fundamental difference: while one is open, the other is not.  JavaFX Mobile technology will be available under an open source licence, enabling content owners, device manufacturers, and communities of developers to compete and innovate. Check out Jonathan's blog for more details.

JavaOne 2007 kicked off today with Rich Green's keynote, and an important announcement.  We announced JavaFX Script, a new scripting language aimed at content developers for the Internet.  This will make it easier to build web applications with highly interactive user interfaces. The other cool thing announced today was JavaFX Mobile that brings the same capability to mobile handsets.

The slide Rich showed on Java's success over the past 12 years was pretty cool:

  - 6,000,000  developers programming in Java

  - 5,500,000,000 Java devices

  - 2,500,000 downloads of GlassFish (Open Source Java App Server)

  - 800,000,000 desktops running Java

  - 1,800,000,000 phones running Java

  - 11,000,000 televisions running Java

Here are a few photos from today's event:

© 2007 Kristinn Thorleifsson - all rights reserved

I spent the day at StartUp Camp 2 in San Francisco.  This is the second StartUp Camp that is pulled together by David Berlin and Doug Gold of Mass Events Labs.  The format is "un-conference" where the participants themselves propose and choose the sessions.  See my blog from last November on the first StartUp Camp they ran.  Jonathan kicked off the event with a short address. After lunch, there was a "SpeedGeeking" event where entrepreneurs presented their companies

© 2007 Kristinn Thorleifsson – all rights reserved

 Today was the eve of the JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco.  I met up with a couple of old friends from the JavaSoft days, Blake Connell, who's now with BEA, and Calvin Austin who's now with SpikeSource.  Calvin and I worked closely together on Java for Linux, and later on Java 5.

© 2007 Kristinn Thorleifsson - all rights reserved

 I also ran into Jim Grisanzio at a JavaOne reception tonight.  Jim is the community manager for OpenSolaris, and relocated to Tokyo, Japan, a little over a year ago.  He is one of the most active bloggers at Sun.

We're running a promotion right now.  Qualified users who signs up for Network.com account in the next few days receive 200 FREE promotional CPU hours. 

Also added a link here to the press release.

Big news today.  Two things actually.  

First of all, we have extended the Network.com service to include 24 countries.  Users in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom can now tap into the power of Network.com and Sun Grid for HPC compute power, under the pay-as-you-go utility model.

Secondly, we've added a couple of really cool features.  One is "Internet Access" that allows an application running in Sun Grid at Network.com to access external data and services anywhere on the Internet.  Pretty handy for someone running, say DNA or protein modelling, and be able to tap into the public DNA databases instead of having to upload all the data to the grid, just to give you one example.                                           

The other features we're rolling out in Beta are Job Management APIs that provide programmatic access to Sun Grid at Network.com, simplifying the integration of Network.com into the enterprise datacenter.  This allows enterprises running their own HPC grid infrastructures to tap into Network.com for peak capacity or "overflow"  when their compute processing needs exceeds the capacity of their HPC infrastructure.

 
Here's a video celebrating Sun's 25th anniversary.

Sun tradition of April Fool's Jokes continues.  This year's prank was not one of my favorites, but here is one from 1986 starring Google's Eric Schmidt, then a Sun Vice President:

To learn more about Sun's strategy and vision for Network.com, I suggest you listen to this innovating@sun podcast.

Hear Hal Stern, Vice President of Sun Systems Engineering, and Jim Parkinson, Sun Vice President of Engineering for Collaboration and ISVs, discuss how ISVs, open source communities and developers, and end users can benefit from Network.com.

Also, check out the Sun Net Talk Program on Network.com here, our press release, and a short feature story published on the front page of sun.com this morning.  (I am quoted in there somewhere).  All these provide a lot if insight into what we're doing with Network.com.  

Laura McLellan, a leading Gartner analyst provides a great perspective on Network.com in today's Internet World:  "Sun is giving ISVs tech support to get their apps grid-enabled and free time to develop and test them," McLellan told internetnews.com. "HP and IBM charge from day one. And, Sun is letting the software provider keep customer control. I like the strategy because it lets them build communities of ISVs and software providers who can look at Sun and say 'This is not someone who is going to compete with us, but help us.' It's fully transparent."

Finally, here is a presentation, providing instructions on how to publish an application to the Network.com application catalog, using Blender, an open source rendering software for 3D content, as an example.

Today we launched the Network.com application catalog that enables software vendors, open source communities, and developers to publish applications online and deliver them as a service to scientists and researchers in business and academia.  Through Network.com, researchers will now have instant access to popular ISV and open source applications they need in their work on a pay-per-use basis.   I want to take a moment to share some thoughts on the significance of this.

I think this is pretty cool.  Network.com is truly the world's first offering that delivers high performance computing (HPC) applications and infrastructure for complex computations as a pay-as-you-go service to end users.  It's like the iTunes music store for HPC.  A research scientist looking to do some, say molecular modeling, can now log onto Network.com, select the application they want to run, upload their data, and crunch away. The service is available when and how they need it without prior reservation, and without long term contract obligation.

We expect Network.com to take HPC where HPC hasn't gone before.  Traditionally, serious users of HPC have primarily been organizations that have had deep enough pockets to invest in expensive IT infrastructure needed to run complex computations.  The little guys, small start-ups, individual developers, and smaller research labs, have had to either get access to HPC resources through a larger partner, or depend on inferior systems.  Now they can get access to a world-class HPC facility via a Web browser, and not just that, but a facility that hosts the applications they need to get the job done.  Network.com is truly breaking barriers to further adoption of HPC into new markets and opening up new opportunities.

For software vendors this opens up opportunities as well. With Network.com, we are making it easy for ISVs with HPC applications to enter the on-demand market.  They don't need to worry about owning, operating, and maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver on-demand apps, and through Network.com they get a powerful oneline storefront to promote and market their applications.  This will allow ISVs to not only grow their existing business, but also enter new markets and offer their applications to users who traditionally haven't been able to afford their own HPC infrastructure.

Last September we announced a Readiness Initiative to enable ISVs more easily to port end deploy their applications to our grid environment.  The program provides resources for developing and marketing applications for Network.com, access to Sun's experts, and evaluation of pay-per-use business models.

The part I am most excited about however, is how Network.com can empower developers and open source communities, and help promote wider adoption of open source software.  Anyone can become a publisher of software to Network.com.  This means that open source communities working on HPC projects can distribute their software more easily. Today most open source projects posts the bits on their website for download.  Using Network.com they can now publish their applications in a production ready turn-key environment, and deliver them as a service to end users.  Same goes for individual developers.  They can become "powersellers" on Network.com and can easily charge for their applications if they choose to.

In addition to working with commercial ISV partners, we have joined over 50 open source projects, and are actively working on growing the list of applications available on Network.com.  We are just there as another member, and we are honored to be participating.

So what's the relationship between Sun Grid and Network.com?  Sun Grid provides he runtime service for the Network.com application catalog.  As I mentioned in my blog Sunday, first we had to deliver the infrastructure, and that's what Sun Grid really is: "infrastructure on-demand."  For many customers, having access to just the infrastructure is enough, especially those that are bringing their own applications.  We are now taking grid computing to the next level by adding "content" (applications) on top of this infrastructure, and allowing anyone to become a publisher of software on the system. This greatly extends the value of the system for end users. Network.com furthermore delivers an online storefront for publishers to market their applications.  If you look on Network.om today, you will see how each applications has its own page with information.  We intent to add more functionality to these pages in the future, such as rating system, customer feedback mechanism, and blogging function to enable communities of users and publishers to interact and share information.

Here is an architecture diagram of Network.com:

For a larger picture, click here.

This shows at a high level how the system works. In addition to the compute nodes powered by AMD Opteron Processors and running Solaris 10, and N1 Grid Engine, Sun Grid provides subsystems for billing, payment, metering and monitoring, job submission and storage. What we have added is the Application Catalog that consists of a Job Catalog that provides a list of published applications.  The Job Catalog can also include private applications that the users has uploaded and are only visible by that user. The Digital Entitlement Token Sub-System, a key innovation that we are delivering here, enables publishers to easily manage licensing of on-demand applications and charge for usage of their apps.  The front end is html based and provides access to the system Web browser. Job submission is as simple as packaging your work and uploading, picking which application to run, describing the job to the system, running it, and retrieving the results.  All available on an on-demand, pay as you go utility model that is priced at $1/CPU-hr. Compute time can be purchased using EBay's PayPal service, or directly from Sun. License for commercial ISV applications is managed through the Digital Entitlement Token system, but many of the applications are free of charge.

I think that's it for now.  Later today I am going to post a few links to some webtalks, and other resources that provide more information.

We have come a long way since we launched the Sun Grid Compute Utility last year.  Sun Grid when launched was the world's first true compute utility made available over the network.  It is a compute utility that provides users with access to enormous compute resources to run any sort of complex calculations.  The Sun Grid basically provides "infrastructure on-demand," where users bring their own applications and data, upload them and run their projects.

Since its launch, we have seen a number of customers utilizing the grid for various things. I have blogged about some of them in the past, such as CD02 that uses the grid to conduct risk analysis for its customers, and AMD that is tapping into the grid to simulate processor performance. The case of CD02 is interesting as access to Sun Grid allowed them to grow their business and service more customers, something that would have been hard if they had had to build all the IT infrastructure in-house.  I could also mention Applied Biosystems who performed compute-intensive data research on Sun Grid to develop millions of new genomic assays. 

These, and all our other customer, have benefited from the utility model: none of them had to make large investments in IT infrastructure; none of them had to sign a long term contract locking them in for an extended period; all of them were able to shorten the time to results; and all of them only paid for the compute power they used.  Such is the nature of a true utility offering.  You come and you go as you please.  You use what you need, and you only pay for what you use. If someone wants to offer you a "utility," check if it meets this criteria.  If not, they are probably trying to sell you on traditional hosting.

Another benefit of using Sun Grid Compute Utility is that users do not need to make large capital investments in IT infrastructure, not to mention worry about operation, space, power, and cooling issues. That's Sun's problem, not yours.  IT becomes an operational expense, not a capital expense. 

The launch of Sun Grid has been a tremendous learning experience for us.  From every perspective.  There are of-course significant engineering challenges associated with building a multi-tenant, secure, and rock-solid public compute utility service that is offered over the Internet.  But there are also a lot of interesting business and legal challenges we have encountered.  The pricing model of $1/CPU-hour with no additional cost or hidden fees sounds simple enough for customers. That's what matters in a utility model: Simple for the end users, and all that complexity hidden from view.  After all, when I plug my laptop in the wall to charge the battery, I don't think about how the electricity travels from the Hoover Dam (or wherever it's generated) through the PG&E electrical grid to my house.  The same goes for the compute power you get via the Sun Grid.

To give you some insight into the legal issues we have had to resolve, you may want to check out the blog that Matt Dillon, Sun's General Counsel, wrote earlier on Sun Grid:

"The idea behind the Sun Grid is that in the future, just as with electric power, individuals will access their compute power, software applications and storage over the Internet. It is an intriguing idea that presents an interesting, but complex array of legal and regulatory challenges. In the course of developing the Sun Grid we have had to consider legal issues involving: data privacy, data security, regulations applicable to on-line commerce, DMCA, tax, Sarbanes-Oxley, Digital Rights Management, state and federal consumer protection statutes, licensing of third-party applications in a hosted environment and US export controls."

I like Matt's analogy on comparing compute power with electricity. We have done that before, see Jonathan's blog.  Nick Carr, more than most others, has exploited this point.  While I may not agree with all his statements, I believe he hits the nail on the head when he talks about the future of computing being utility.  As a side item, I should also mention his "Trailer park computing" blog he wrote on Sun's Blackbox, a mobile datacenter in a container, where he argues that it is one more manifestation of the fundamental shift in computing.

Carr's take on what he believes to be Sun's approach to utility computing is also interesting:  "It's the Thomas Edison strategy. In 1888, Edison built the world's first electric utility - the Pearl Street Station in New York City. It was a marvel of engineering, but it took a couple of years before it turned a profit. Edison didn't care, though. He built the station as a model for others. And his plan worked. Pearl Street set off a boom in the construction of similar generating plants around the country, some operated as public utilities, others operated privately within factories. Edison's company - General Electric - made its money by outfitting those plants, not by running them.  My guess is that that's what Sun is hoping to do as well."

I think any reasonable person with knowledge of the IT industry would agree that utility computing is the way of the future. The question is really how and how fast will it be adopted.  I think this will be an evolution; customers are not throwing out their IT infrastructure to go all online.  But as new IT needs emerge, they will increasingly look to online services to meet that need.  Right now for some projects it makes sense, for others customers will opt for running the systems in-house.  It will adopted at different rate by different industries and for different types of projects.  Overtime the pendulum will swing towards utility computing, and when it swings, Sun with it's utility computing expertise, will be in a position to lead the way.

So what's next?  Well, first we had to build out a rock-solid, secure infrastructure.  Now it's time to take it to the next level. 

This is funny, especially when you read people's comments such as: "AWESOME! MICROSOFT RULES!" and "AMAZING!... Can't wait till vista."  Someone posted this Video on YouTube last year as an example of Windows Vista 3D features, and labeled is as an internal review of Vista.  Check it out:

Not exactly Windows Vista.  It's actually Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz FOUR years ago when he was running the Sun Software Group showing Project Looking Glass, a 3D Java desktop running on Linux that was developed in the Sun Microsystems Laboratories.  I'm glad that the Microsoft crowd is getting a rise out of a four year old technology from Sun thinking it's Vista.  Keep on innovating, Microsoft!  Then there is this video showing a really cool 3D Linux desktop:

Really cool.  Now compare this to the rather dull Windows Vista 3D features. Windows Vista doesn't really offer a 3D desktop, but they allow you to view some windows in a 3D mode. After 7 years in development and $6,000,000,000 in R&D this is what you get:

Since I'm blogging on Vista, I'll add this clip showing a New York Times journalist comparing Windows Vista with Mac OS X. As you can tell Microsoft didn't steal anything from Apple. 

It was truly a historic announcement we made today.  This strategic agreement with Intel is truly a move that is set to open up a number of opportunities for both companies.  We will be designing server computers using the Intel Xeon processors, and Intel has endorsed Solaris OS as the Unix operating system of choice.  Read Jonathan's blog for the CEO perspective.

This agreement with Intel further solidifies Solaris' position as the leading Unix on the market. It's interesting to consider the operating system space:

Unix: Solaris is it. IBM's AIX, and HP's HP-UX are going, going, gone...

Linux: It's really just RedHat. I don't see SuSE doing anything cool, but Ubuntu is making some headways on the client side. 

BSD: Mac OS X. Other BSD variants such as OpenBSD and FreeBSD are not going anywhere.

Windows: Here too stay.

OSs I run: Solaris OS on my SunRay think client at work, and on my Sun laptop. Mac OS X on my personal MacBook Pro, and Ubuntu Linux on an old system at home.

InfoWorld just awarded us the 2007 Technology of the Year Awards for the best servers. 

"The Sun Fire X4200 is a serious server in a seriously well-designed  package. A frontrunner in both performance and management, it held its own in our file server and Web server tests, and Sun's remote control function is nicely implemented. We could picture ourselves building out an entire datacenter with X4200s."  - InfoWorld

See the full InfoWorld product review of the Sun Fire X4200 here.  Not only did we win the 2007 Technology of the Year Award for the best server, but our Sun Fire X4600 M2 won the award for the best high-performance server as well.

 "Sun packed a whole lot of power into the Sun Fire X4600, which sports as many as eight AMD Opteron dual-core CPUs and 128GB of RAM. The plentiful processing and I/O resources make this server a tremendous platform for virtualization, HPC, and database applications. And the overall server design is impeccable." - InfoWorld 

Here is the full product review.

Apple picked up the award for best notebook and desktop in the hardware section.  We also picked up an award in the application development tool segment for our NetBeans 5.5 software.  Product review here.

"NetBeans already had the most complete collaboration features among IDE platforms. This year it added important new modules such as Matisse, the most advanced Java GUI designer available today, and complete support for Java EE 5. NetBeans is likely all that developers of enterprise Java applications will need." - InfoWorld 

Try out these award winning products for free. NetBeans 5.5 can be downloaded here for free.  A number of Sun servers are available for a free 60 day trial.  Check out our 'Try and Buy program'.

We launched some updates to our Solaris 10 Operating System today. Already THE most secure operating system on the planet, the updates announced today further enhance its security and reliability and help solidify its leadership position in the industry.  The cost of deploying Solaris is half that of Red Hat Linux, which is important to enterprises and emerging startups alike.   Solaris also delivers unprecedented choice to customers as it can be deployed on over 700 (735 to be exact) x64/x86 platforms, more than any other OS on the market.  You're not tied to Sun hardware, in other words if you want to use Solaris for your business, although we can make a strong case for choosing Solaris optimized Sun hardware. 

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, and currently of Ning, did some calculations earlier on the cost of using Solaris on Sun/AMD Opteron servers as oppose to Red Hat on AMD and Intel whiteboxes. He sent Jonathan his results, and Jonathan posted them in his blog last February.

You can see the summary of new features, the launch video, and some of the proof points here.  Solaris is licensed under an open source software license, making it easy for customers to try it out.  OpenSolaris can be downloaded here. 

Matt Dillon, Sun's general counsel and corporate secretary, has an interesting article in today's Business Week Online on how corporate blogs can help public corporations connect directly with it's shareholders.  Matt's article is a response to Jacqueline Klosek's story in Business Week on corporate blogs, Corporate Blogs: Handle With Care.   Jonathan blogged about this earlier, and wrote a letter to the same effect to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Matt is an avid blogger, and probably one of the few, if not the only, Fortune 500 general counsels that does so. He posted an interesting blog on Sun Grid Compute Utility back in August.

We conducted an online chat on Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com at the end of last week.  The transcript of the Q&A session has been posted here.  This was a part of the Online Gridathon we recently launched.  The other part of the Gridathon was a technical presentation given as I have mentioned before. Check it out. We intent to o another one of these online chats sometime in Q1 of 2007.  To register for a reminder of this future event, click here. 

Mark your calendar for Sun Grid expert exchange on December 7, an interactive online chat session that will enable you to connect directly with Sun Grid engineers and designers with your questions. 

Time and Date: Thursday, December 7, 2006
San Francisco:  10:00 - 11:00  PST
New York:         13:00 - 14:00  EST
London:            18:00 - 19:00  GMT+00:00

This is the second part of the Online Gridathon we're running, and I've mentioned before, both here and here.  The first part of the Online Gridathon is an online technical overview presentation given by Sun Grid Product Line Manager, David Folk.  Click here to see David's slides in pdf format.  To register for the online interactive chat session, click here.

Supercomputing SC06, wrapped up at the end of this week in Tampa, Florida.  We made a number of important announcements at this event, and we're seeing a lot of positive press coverage as a result. I was in Tampa earlier in the week and posted a blog on the event yesterday.

Here is a summary of what I found by while quickly scanning the news sites:

Sun releases smaller blade chassis (CNET and ZDNet, Stephen Shankland)
Sun rolls out new toys: Blades, services and tools (The Inquirer, Charlie Demerjian)
Sun announces 1.2 TFlop rack server (TG Daily, Wolfgang Gruener)
Mississippi State Selects Sun Servers for HPC Collaboratory (HPCWire)
Sun Grid Compute Utility Attracts ISV Applications (GridToday)
Sun Announces New HPC Products and Services (HPCWire)
NEC Expands Alliance with Sun Microsystems TechNews
Sun Bulks Up HPC Offerings (eWeek, Jeffrey Burt)

 
AMD Processors are on the rise in supercomputing according to the latest updated list of 500 largest supercomputers. Intel still leads with 263 systems on the supercomputer 500 list, a drop from 301 last year.  AMD systems increased from 81 to 113 in the same period.  The Sun Grid Compute Utility is one of the Sun sites listed on the TOP 500 list, but Sun has 10 systems on the list, all using AMD Opteron.  Not only does Sun Grid take advantage of AMD Opterons, but AMD itself is also tapping into the power of Sun Grid to simulate processor performance on their next generation chip. 

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination."   - Albert Einstein.

Supercomputing SC06 is the premier international event in 2006 on high performance computing, bringing together the experts in various areas in the field. This year's conference took place in Tampa, Florida, and we made a number of important announcements there. Supercomputing is rapidly becoming competitive advantage in not just for scientists, but for corporate enterprises, and emerging businesses as well. Not to mention governments as they are working on building national competitive advantage, as I have discussed before.

I attended the event earlier this week, and here are a few photos I shot:

 © 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved  

Here are some of the key announcements Sun made this week in the area of high performance computing.
- We announced Sun HPC Quick Start Services, a comprehensive suite of pre-configured services designed to help customers architect, implement, and manage their HPC environment with faster deployment, improved performance, reduced risk, and lower cost.
- We announced the Sun Blade 8000 P Modular System, the first blade server designed for high-end x64 clusters.
- We announced the Sun Ultra 40 M2 workstation, the industry's fastest workstation.
- We announced Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage.
- We announced Sun HPC ClusterTools 6 Software,
 an integrated toolkit that allows developers to create and tune MPI applications that run on clusters and SMPs, as well as the Sun HPC Cluster Tools 7, Early Access Program.
- We announced the relese of 3 new modules to the Grid Engine Project, making a key contribution to the advancement of open-source technologies for HPC.

Now that's a lot of announcements, but I'm not done. We also made some announcements on Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com. We are seeing a lot of interest among HPC ISVs in Sun Grid, and we are currently working with over 15 software vendors who will be hosting their HPC applications on Sun Grid and deliver them as a service to their end users. This will be the world's first true HPC software as a service (HPC SaaS) utility enabling the software vendors to create a new avenue for revenue generation. The utility model is very beneficial to the end users as they get access to the software without the need to invest in expensive infrastructure; on Sun Grid you only pay for what you use, no long term commitment, no contract required.

Sun Gridathon
At Supercomputing '06 we ran one of our Gridathon sessions. The Sun Gridathon allowed the conference attendees to meet face to face with the designers and engineers behind Sun Grid to explore and have in-depth technical discussion on everything relating to grid.

 
© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved
Sun Grid Product Line Manager, David Folk, delivers the Sun Gridathon presentation in Tampa, Florida.

I have mentioned earlier that in order to bring the Sun Gridathon to more people we have developed an online version that is has two components. The first component, a live video presentation, outlining the Sun Grid Compute Utility is available today, click here to view it. The second component of the Sun Gridathon is a live interactive chat session that will enable you to bring your questions to Sun Grid engineers and designers. The live chat is scheduled for December 7. To sign up for a reminder, click here.

Today we made a historic announcement. We're making Java source code available to the world under an open source license. This solidifies Sun's leadership as the largest commercial contributor to the open source community, but previously we have contributed OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, OpenOffice, and NetBeans among other smaller projects.

The story of Java has been remarkable. Since its introduction in May 1995, the Java platform has been adopted more quickly across the industry than any other new technology in computing history. Today it remains the largest software development platform in the world, and Java can be found everywhere on the network, and all sorts of devices. 

The Java project was started by James Gosling in June 1991 under the name “The Green Project”.  The team, called the “Green Team”, was tucked away at an undisclosed location on Sand Hill Road and cut almost all communications with Sun. The team, staffed with 13 people, was chartered to anticipate the next wave of computing.  Java was originally conceived to as a platform for consumer devices in anticipation of convergence of digitally controlled consumer devices and computers. After working around the clock for 18 months, the team emerged with a working demo, an an interactive, hand held home-entertainment device controller with an animated touchscreen user interface. The team soon found a new use for the new technology, named “Oak” at the time: to enable dynamic content on the World Wide Web, across networks, on heterogeneous devices and platforms.  For more info see James Gosling's Brief History of the Green Project.

The Green Team. This is a photo taken at a barbecue that James Gosling threw for some of the folks associated with the Green Team. From left to right they are: Al Frazier, Joe Palrang, Mike Sheridan, Ed Frank, Don Jackson, Faye Baxter, Patrick Naughton, Chris Warth, James Gosling, Bob Weisblatt, David Lavallee, and Jon Payne. Missing in action: Cindy Long, Chuck Clanton, Sheueling Chang, and Craig Forrest. Click here for larger image.

The fertilizer hit the ventilator on March 23, 1995, when the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's leading newspaper, ran a story on Java. Originally planned for the paper's business section, the Mercury News ran the story on the front page kicking off the Java revolution.  For more history on Java, see the piece David Bank wrote on the Java Saga in Wired Magazine in December last year.

Front page of San Jose Mercury News on March 23, 1995.  See larger image here.

Java became the fastest growing technology ever adopted, and soon there were more software developers in the world writing software code for the Java platform than the Microsoft platform.

The first home page for java.sun.com.   Click here for a larger image.

My first job at Sun was actually as a product manager for Java, initially focused on Java on Linux and other open source operating systems, and soon the Java 2 Platform Edition (J2SE), now know as Java SE. Kim Polese, the first product manager working on Java, wrote this piece last year at the 10 year Java anniversary.

So what's the significance of today's announcement? I believe this will accelerate the ubiquity of Java in the open source community and will help stimulate innovation and opportunity. This will furthermore lower barriers to adoption in markets where open source software leads, creating new opportunities for Java developers and enables them to play a more active role in shaping the future of the Java platform. This is especially important for our customers who require open source software, such as companies working on embedded appliances, and governments and educational institutions throughout the world.

At GridWorld 2006, and now at SuperComputing '06, we have been enabling the conference attendees to meet face to face with Sun Grid engineers, the experts that designed and architected Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com.  These have been wildly popular sessions in the past, and have enabled the participants to have an in-depth discussion with our engineers on issues relating to grid technologies.

In order to bring the benefit of the Gridathons to more people, we have created a version of the Gridathon for online consumption by technical audiences. The Online Gridathon consists of a technical presentation, given by our Sun Grid product manager, David Folk, and on December 7, we will run an interactive live chat session that allows our customers to connect directly with Sun Grid engineers and experts. It's not the one-on-one forum we run at the real events, but it comes close. So, view the online video, and mark your calendar for December 7 and join us at a live interacive online chat on Sun Grid.

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Sun sponsored Startup Camp “un-conference”. This is my first “un-conference,” and I have to say it turned out great. Instead of a conference committee selecting the sessions and managing the event tightly, the un-conference participants themselves suggest and choose the sessions. The format is much more informal, and allows for more interaction and makes the conference very dynamic and relevant to the attendees. I'm looking forward to my next un-conference.

We had a session on Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com. The utility computing model is especially relevant to startup companies who have little cash to spare, and want to use it to invest in code development and building value add services, as oppose to investing in expensive IT infrastructure. Sun Grid, as it is today, is relevant to startups that are building services that require high massive computing resources to run large HPC batch-type jobs. Check out my previous blog on “Grid Computing to Build National Competitive Advantage”. It provides examples of companies that are ideal for Sun Grid Compute Utility.

Here are a few photos I took at the event:

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

I ran into Danese Cooper, who used to hold the title of "Open Source Diva" at Sun. She's now at Intel working on their open source initiatives. She had an interesting talk on how startups can take advantage of open source software.

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

We're sponsoring a Startup Camp on November 2-3 in Silicon Valley. This is an event, an "un-conference" that's dedicated at bringing together various members of the startup community for a face-to-face meetup.



The un-conference format is pretty cool. It uses Open Space methodology to allow attendees to control the agenda and ensures that the conference is relevant, vibrant, and interesting. Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk commented on this format in his blog back in July. To join in, just go to the Startup Camp website and sign up.

Check out Sun's Bryan Cantrill on PodTech. Bryan is the Sun staff engineer who created the DTrace technology that received the gold award in the Wall Street Journal 2006 Technology Innovation Award last month. Also check out Bryan's blog here. DTrace is a pretty cool technology in Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System, and is making it's way into Leopard, Apple's next revision of the Mac OS X according the this.

Globalization and increased global competition is causing governments around the world to look at Silicon Valley as a model of how to stay competitive. Our CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and a number of other Silicon Valley executives such as Apple's Steve Jobs, HP's Mark Hurd, and Cisco's John Chambers, had a chance to sit down with Tony Blair the other day when the British PM visited the west coast. The Prime Minister wanted advice on advancing the Britain's position in the world. See Jonathan's blog about the meeting.


Tony Blair with Steve Jobs and John Chambers. (Photo: Reuters)

The discussion centered around the role of education and R&D to drive economic growth. Silicon Valley is a major growth engine for California and the US. The amount of innovation that is happening here is staggering, and the key driver is the valley's highly educated workforce. There are other factors that help drive this as well such as a legal environment that is friendly to business, access to venture capital, culture that understands and appreciates innovation, and efficient financial markets to name a few.

Information Technology plays an important role in enabling competitive advantage at the national or regional level. Not only do today's most successful businesses take advantage of IT to optimize their performance, improve their operations, and service their customers better, but IT is also at the hearth of scientific discovery. Scientists in various fields require significant computing resources to conduct their research and advance their knowledge. Scientific innovation in turn provides a fertile ground for new business ventures that help fuel economic growth and prosperity that helps governments build and maintain competitive advantage.

Take Sun as an example. Sun Microsystems itself is a company that thrives on innovation. Founded in the early 1980's by graduates of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, Sun has succeeded by being able to tap into the Silicon Valley talent pool that is attracted by the area's competitive advantage in scientific research and innovation. The innovation society in Silicon Valley has proved to be an enormous economic growth engine that has enabled the region and the State of California to prosper and grow and deliver benefits to all its citizens.

Here is a prime example of how governments are supporting research and development in the US. Recently we announced that with  grant from the National Science Foundation, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is going to build the world's largest supercomputer using Sun's technology, the very same technology Sun Grid Compute Utility available at Network.com is built on.

I believe that Sun Grid Compute Utility can help federal, state, and local governments build and foster innovation societies in their respective regions that benefits academia, business, and all constituents.

Sun Grid Compute Utility is essentially a “supercomputer” that delivers enormous computational power that is available to academia and business alike. The utility model enables users to get flexible access to these resources at an affordable price without the need to large investments in IT infrastructure. By tapping into Sun's assets, paying only for the compute cycles they need, users can increase data center capacity and better manage project and usage volatility – while transferring risk to Sun. Sun Grid enables businesses, scientists and researchers to optimize performance, speed time to results, and accelerate innovation without investment in IT  nfrastructure build-out and without the long-term life cycle costs related to capital, management and operations, depreciation, and floor space.

Here are some examples of how governments can take advantage of Sun Grid Compute Utility:

Foster Education and Scientific Research:

Sun Grid Compute Utility can enable governments to support universities and research institutions in their regions by providing access to computational power through a utility “pay-as-you-go” model that traditionally has only been available to few, well funded organizations and large corporations.

As an example, this would benefit:
- Academics and research scientists at local universities and research institutions in the fields of bio-technology, life-sciences, electrical engineering, physics, computer science, to name a few.
- Local universities who are planning to build or grow departments that require access to computational resources, but lack the resources to build their own IT infrastructure.  By tapping into a compute utility, educational and research institutions can achieve more with less.

Attract Top Talent:

Access to resources is required to attract highly skilled workforce in the area of science and academia. Computational power as delivered by Sun Grid Compute Utility is one of these resources needed to advance scientific discovery and enable scientists to succeed in their respective fields.

As an example this would benefit:
- Educational and research institutions working on attracting highly skilled research scientists and academics that are at the forefront in their fields.
- Local businesses in the “innovation industries” dependent on a large talent pool of highly skilled workers.

Attract Innovative Businesses:

The strategic importance of IT is playing an ever increasing role in the success both traditional and emerging businesses. An access to supercomputing resource in the area can attract businesses in various industries.

As an example, this would benefit:
- Financial institutions that require computational resources to run complex financial modeling , credit analysis, Dow-Jones forecasting, econometrics, pricing model, stock market, and Monte Carlo type analysis.
- Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies working on molecular drug testing, radiation cancer therapy, or genome research.
- Software vendors looking at establishing their presence in the emerging Software-as-a-Service market, or offer software or IT services that require significant compute power.
- New business ventures and venture capital companies that are looking for a powerful, yet cost effective computational resource to launch their products and services.
- Energy companies needing to process large amounts data for oil well exploration.
- Media and entertainment firms that  to render digital media content and computer animation, hosting online consumer facing applications, and other complex and time intensive calculations.
- Semiconductor manufactures running complex computations in order to design the next generation microprocessors, memory chips, or integrated circuits. - Telecommunication companies that require computational resources to host batch jobs for Voice-over-IP billing services, analytics, or data pre-processing.
- Manufacturing firms requiring computational power for artificial intelligence, robotics, and navigation.

These are just some of the examples that a supercomputing resource such as Sun Grid could benefit governments seeking to build national competitiveness. I can mention a number of examples of companies that are taking advantage of Sun Grid today. I blogged earlier about how CD02, a financial services company, is benefitting from Sun Grid. I should also mention my previous blog about AMD on Sun Grid.

If you're in the US, you can access Sun Grid at Network.com as Sun Grid public utility is currently only available to US-based users. Elsewhere, the Sun Grid model presents an opportunity to service providers and telcos interested providing a similar service in their region and opportunity to team up with Sun on the build-out of a compute utility powered by the Sun Grid IP.

Finally, I'd like to mention that we are already enabling academics to take tap into the power of Sun Grid. Last March, at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference, we announced that we were awarding 10 institutions the Sun Grid Education Grant for 100,000 free promotional CPU hours each on the Sun Grid, continuing on our promise to provide 1 million CPU hours to universities. A number of scientists and academics are taking advantage of this grant to further our knowledge in various fields. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

Check out Dave Douglas' tour of Project Blackbox on YouTube.

The reaction I've seen has been pretty positive so far. Carl Howe has a very positive take on this, and says it "could easily be one of the most transformational computing products of the decade".  Nick Carr has an interesting take in this as well.

Late last year a rumor spread around Silicon Valley about a secret Google project, and a revolutionary and innovative concept: A shipping container with a prototype datacenter. Pretty neat idea, don't you think? Project Blackbox has been in development in Sun Laboratories for some time now, and was unveiled today. This Webpronews.com story provides an insight into how someone like Google or YouTube could take advantage of a mobile datacenter to deliver streaming video content without hickup. This is just one example of how a mobile datacenter will fuel the future of the Internet.

Check out Greg's blog for more background info on the project.

Today we introduced a pilot of the world's first virtualized, mobile datacenter, Project Blackbox. The economics of Project Blackbox are pretty compelling for the CIO. The Project Blackbox concept is 1/100th the initial cost if compared to a 10,000sqft datacenter and delivers 3 times more compute power in the same space. Since it's contained (literally) it delivers efficiency of scale and ulitmate flexibility. Suggest you read Jonathan's blog from earlier today about the project and why this latest Sun innovation matters to our customers. I shot a few photos at the launch event today. 

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson – all rights reserved

Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, with CTO Greg Papadopoulos unveiled Project Blackbox out on the parkinglot at the Sun Menlo Park headquarters. I picked up this little eighteen-wheeler toy truck at the launch for my desk.