Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Before leaving London I had time to grab a quick breakfast at one of the many restaurants located in the Covent Garden area a few blocks from my hotel. There are many small bakeries, cafes, pubs, and varied international fare tucked into the back alleys, although I never found the garden.

Hamburg promised even better running around the beautiful Binnenalster Lake formed out of the river that runs through town. The jogging path around the lake is a little less than 10K and easily accessed from my hotel, Le Meridian. With the next few days packed with customer meetings and International Supercomputer Conference events, I'll need every bit of the nearly 20 hours of daylight right now to get in my daily run.

If your in town this morning, don't miss out on Andy Bechtolsheim's presentation at the Sun HPC Consortium on Sun's HPC Roadmap.

On the way to the Sun HPC Consortium starting today in Hamburg, I stopped off in London to meet first with a few customers. Now twenty-four hours in London is not really enough to get jet-lagged, but here are my tips.

One of my favorite business hotels in Central London is the Sheraton Park Lane. It is conveniently located across from London's Green Park and plenty of lovely running paths. Exiting the Sheraton onto Piccadilly, cross the street to Green Park and head counter-clockwise. Halfway around the park you will get to Buckingham Palace, crossing the street in front of the Palace to get to St. James Park. My typical jet-lag recovery run continues counter-clockwise for a loop around St. James Park, then a reverse clockwise loop, then back across to Green Park continuing counter-clockwise to your starting point. Depending on your pace, its an easy 30-40 minute run which is perfect to get you ready for a sleep-deprived day of customer meetings.

The next key to avoiding jet-lag is to avoid the temptation to skip dinner and go to sleep early. The perfect remedy for that is just a short cab-ride away at Ozer's Turkish Restaurant. While the 11-course "Healthy Meal" special may not sound healthy by the title, it is an absolutely wonderful tasting-size assortment of Turkish specialities with just the right amount of spices to make you forget sleep for a few more hours. For those that prefer, there is a vegetarian option of the healthy meal as well although I quite enjoyed the marinated, grilled chicken and lamb courses of the standard meal.

Tomorrow, I'll share my Hamburg running tips.

If you can't get to Germany for this month's Sun HPC Consortium, you have a second chance coming up in September when we will host the Sun HPC Software Workshop in beautiful Regensburg, Germany. It's a great opportunity for users to get answers, advice, and suggestions regarding their specific implementations, and to share their insights with colleagues.

This three day workshop contains three tracks with Sun and Customer presentations around Sun Grid Engine, Open Storage (including Lustre and SAM-QFS), and software Tools such as Sun Studio and Sun HPC ClusterTools. Talks will range from general to very detailed engineering topics. At times in the schedule the three tracks will merge into one track for specific plenary sessions that have a general interest. For example, a detailed talk on Sun’s HPC Stack would be a plenary session. The conference will begin at 9am on Tuesday and end at 1pm on Thursday.

If you are going to International Supercomputer Conference later this month in Hamburg, there is still time to come early and attend the Sun HPC Consortium. Highlights of the HPC Consortium are sure to be Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim updating the audience on Sun's roadmap for the Sun Constellation System, as well as Dr. Thomas Lippert of the Jülich Supercomputer Center who will give a preview of how one of the first 2000+ node Sun Constellation Systems with Sun's latest "Magnum" QDR InfiniBand switch did in the Top500 Linpack benchmark before the official Top500 update is published later that week. See today's press release for more info on the Jülich system.

The Jülich VIP data center tour was a rare treat. I can only imagine anthropologists examining the site 100's of years from now and wondering why anyone would run 5 MW of power and 1000's of gallons an hour of water into the basement of a gymnasium sized building.

Running a PetaFlop BlueGene system, a 2000 node Sun cluster, and a 1000 node Bull cluster takes a lot of cooling water. The facilities work that goes into a modern HPC data center is an absolutely amazing act of mechanical engineering in and of itself, never mind the computers.

If you look closely you will see the chilled water connector from the Sun Constellation System rear cooling door at the bottom right of the rack. A flexible connector is used to connect to the under-floor chiller water supply. There is also a top-of-door connector (not shown) for customers who run chiller water pipes above the racks.

Here is another shot of the under-floor piping.

Sun also has a gas refrigerant cooling door option for Sun Constellation System. The gas refrigerant door requires smaller diameter piping to the racks and can have other advantages, although it does require an external unit which can be outside the computer room, typically with its own chilled water heat exchanger. Sun's data center design team can help design the ideal data center cooling system for your Sun Constellation System.

Everyone from traditional web hosting companies to university HPC centers are rebranding themselves with the Cloud Computing moniker these days, but what's the reality behind the hype. We certainly have many great hardware and software products that can be used for HPC, web hosting, and just about anything else you would want to do "in a cloud", but when Sun talks about cloud computing, there are a couple of key defining concepts we focus on:

Virtualization

Multi-tenancy

Real-time, user-controlled provisioning

Pay-per-use

We believe there will be many different types of clouds, including public clouds like Amazon's offerings and the Sun Cloud, enterprise clouds, clouds run by service providers, and other hybrid offerings.

My group at Sun, besides selling large HPC systems, is responsible for helping customers build enterprise clouds using Sun's technology. Many of our customers are starting down the path of building enterprise clouds, most are not ready to talk about it in public. So I was very excited to read about NASA's enterprise cloud, called Nebula, and how it is using the Sun Lustre file system as a key part of their cloud architecture. The Nebula web site gives a detailed description of their Lustre implementation.

My group has, of course, worked on most of the large Lustre deployments, including many on non-Sun hardware, that have been done around the world. One thing we realized is that not everyone has rocket scientists on their staff, and even if they do, they don't always want to spend their time custom-designing Lustre storage systems. So to help HPC and enterprise cloud customers simplify and accelerate the deployment of Lustre, we have created the Sun Lustre Storage System. Scaling from 1 to over 100 GB/sec, the modular architecture of the Sun Lustre Storage System makes it easy for anyone to deploy Lustre.

In the coming days, you will be hearing a lot more about the Sun Cloud, and many other Sun technologies being used in our cloud deployments.

The Jülich web site has been updated with a nice shot of the Sun Constellation System. They also have details on the technical configuration.

Here is a good view of three of the six Sun Magnum QDR switches at Jülich. Each switch has 648 QDR IB ports exposed as 216 CXP 12x connectors.

I won't show pictures of the other vendor's IB rack, but just think about this with three times as many cables.

Of course, the cabling gets even more challenging under the floor.

But it sure likes nice when you are all done.

And here is the team to thank for all that hard work, yours truly just there for the picture op as I have to say I didn't help with any of this.

Memorial Day started about 9 hours too early for me, as the first rays of sunlight broke through the bottom of the window shade in United Airlines 747 as we descended towards Frankfurt airport. I'm visiting Germany this week for the grand opening of the new Jülich Supercomputer Center, and its 2000 node Sun Constellation System. The Jülich system is one of the first large QDR-based InfiniBand supercomputers, but we expect that 40 Gb/sec QDR technology will rapidly replace the previous generation 20 Gb/sec DDR technology in large clusters, not only because of its higher bandwidth but also because of the improved latency of QDR.

The Jülich system also features a Sun Lustre Storage System directly connected to its InfiniBand network, using multiple Lustre Object Storage Servers (OSS) to provide high speed & parallel access to large single namespace filesystem easily expandable to PetaBytes of storage and 10's or even 100's of GB/sec of storage bandwidth (Oak Ridge National Labs has achieved over 200 GB/sec on their Sun Lustre system).

One unique feature the Jülich system is its InfiniBand fabric using Sun and Mellanox QDR switches. Besides the 2000 node Sun Constellation System using Sun Magnum QDR switches, the Jülich QDR fabric also supports a 1000 node Bull cluster using Mellanox QDR switches. While both the Sun and Bull supercomputers are built out of 2-socket Intel Nehalem compute nodes, the physical size and complexity of the systems stands in stark contrast. Using regular 4x IB cables to connect to the Mellanox switches, the Bull cluster, while only half the number of compute nodes, requires more cables than the Sun Constellation System with its 3-in-1 12x cables. In addition, the Sun Constellation System racks require no internal cables to connect the compute nodes to its built-in "QNEM", the world's first in-chassis QDR leaf switch. While most Sun Constellation Systems use the QNEM to build a fully connected "fat tree" IB fabric, the QNEM also supports mesh and 3D Torus IB fabrics, the latter being used at a Sun Constellation System being deployed at Sandia National Labs in the US.

Bull does a good job of packing 72 of their Nehalem compute nodes into a single rack, but counting their IB racks still requires almost 2x the floorspace of the Sun Constellation System sporting 96 compute nodes in each rack.

Jülich choose Sun's new water-cooled rear door option for the Sun Constellation System, greatly simplifying the cooling design of their data center. Depending on exact CPU and memory configuration, Sun Constellation System racks can require 30-40 KW of cooling per rack which requires some sort of supplemental cooling. Sun provides both water-cooled and refrigerant gas cooled rear door options for Sun Constellation System racks. This approach has advantages over in-row or top-of-rack based supplemental cooling systems in that no supplemental fans are required, air is moved through the cooling doors using only the blade chassis's build-in fans.The supplemental fans in in-row and top-of-rack systems are often left out of customer's power-usage calculations. Sun's Data Center Efficiency practice can help customers design more efficient data centers, be it an entire new from the ground up data center or retrofitting an existing data center.

Well, it is time to head off to the grand opening ceremonies, I'll be back afterwards with more of the story.

In between planning for our upcoming HPC Consortium user group meeting prior to next month's ISC09 conference, I've had a busy week meeting with a number of our HPC partners. I started off the week meeting with Cray's CEO Pete Ungaro. Cray is one of our Lustre partners, offering their customers storage solutions based on the Sun Lustre file system. I also met with Sun partner Integrated Media Technologies. IMT is one of our first partners to qualify for our new Sun HPC Elite partner program, bringing their expertise in Lustre, InfiniBand, and GPGPU technology to our customers. Speaking of GPGPU, yesterday I met with Shanker Trivedi Nvidia's new VP of sales for GPGPU and professional graphics technologies. A number of Sun customers are adding GPGPU's to their Sun clusters, most notably the TiTech TSUBAME supercomputer which now includes 170 Nvidia Tesla GPGPUs.

Want to hear more about Sun's latest plans for Lustre, InfiniBand, and GPGPU technology? June is a wonderful month to visit Germany and the HPC Consortium user group meeting in Hamburg promises to bring you updates in all these areas. There is still time to register at the reduced early bird registration fee. I hope to see many of you there.

Probably the software you are already using today! One of the biggest challenges with any new service is to get people to use it. Adoption always precedes monitization. I tried out the Dropbox service the day it was launched as I happened to be sitting in an airport with an hour to kill when I received the email invite. They have a great front-end, at least on my Mac where I've tried it, but to be honest I don't use it much anymore because I've reached the 2 GB limit of my free account. By contrast, I've been using the beta version of OpenOffice "save to cloud" since the day Sun launched its internal testing, and I save virtually all of my documents to the cloud these days by default. Other than 1 or 2 documents I might need to edit on a flight, any other documents I need to access offline tend to be cached in my email and are accessible offline in that manner. I use Google Docs too for a few personal files that I want to share with family members, but not for mainstream use.

So at least in my trivial example, the killer app for cloud computing is the one I already use - OpenOffice. I don't have to take any extra steps to drag files between folders, I just use save to cloud and open from cloud instead of save and open.

One could easily expand this notion to almost any enterprise software. Do you want to buy special cloud backup software for your database or do you just want a "backup to cloud" button for the database you already use?

I'm not saying there isn't room for innovation in apps like Dropbox, and ultimately the "front end" of clouds and the "back end" are not necessarily linked. That is why Sun is is promoting a set of Open Cloud APIs so that in the future a company like Dropbox can decide to focus on innovating on the front end/client and simply use an existing cloud back end, without getting locked into that back end.

I had not originally planned to pack in LAX-SFO-FRA-PNQ-BOM-SIN-CDG-ORD-LAX in one week, but thanks to modern air travel I was able to make all of last week's important customer events. Everyone I talked to was quite excited about Sun's new HPC specific blade products which along with our new QDR (quad data rate - 40 Gb/sec) InfiniBand and Lustre powered open storage products are bringing great new levels of performance to the Sun Constellation System. We have had our first customer Linpack runs on both 3D Torus and fat tree IB configs, and while we are not quite ready to publicly discuss results, they are pretty amazing. It should make for some interesting Top500 announcements at ISC this June.

Well, since I can't talk about our latest Linpack results, I though I would share my world airport tips.

SFO is simply the best for international connections, now that the walkway from Terminal 3 (United) to the International terminal is complete. Now if only the United flight attendants would update their script to not confuse people with, "please take the shuttle to the international terminal". Due to a late departure from LAX, I had only 30 minutes to make my first connection, luckily my plane pulled up to SFO gate 75, less than a five minute walk to my international gate.

United to Lufthansa connections can require quite a bit longer walk in Frankfurt, and for some reason the airlines are determined to make it just plain hard to get to India. Well, I guess it might have something to do with geography too. Six hours in Frankfurt was plenty of time to sample both the United Red Carpet Club lounge as well as the Lufthansa lounge. But six hours is a long time to spend in an airport, no matter how many lounges you visit.

Pune, India, is an interesting city, especially when you arrive at 3:30 am, one of the few times the streets are uncrowded. With 600 new car registrations every day, and no new roads, well, you get the picture. Tata Motors is based in Pune as I am sure will be thousands of Tata's new Nanos before long. Officially the Nano is a 4 passenger vehicle, but given that I've seen more passengers on an Indian motercycle, I expect the occasional Nano will be found with 5 or more passengers.

Mumbai (Bombay) was destined to be another six hour layover on my way out of the country. Privatization is greatly improving service at India's airports. Sometimes too much. The Jet Airways staff seemed so proud to provide a modern "kneeling" airport bus to transport us no more than 20 yards from our plane's parking spot to the terminal. Then came the dreaded domestic to international terminal transfer bus. Just a few years ago, said "bus" resembled a pre WWII relic of engineering. While today its a modern bus with air conditioning, it was still nearly an hour wait followed by a slow 45 minute crawl across the airfield including what seemed like a 10 minute standoff with an Airbus A320 before the driver finally went around what appeared to be an illegal shortcut.

No surprise given its history near the center of the SARS and Avian (H5N1) flu, Singapore already had their thermal imaging monitors out scanning all incoming travelers for telltale signs of the new H1N1 flu. While definitely my shortest visit to Singapore at less than 24 hours, the Sun Singapore team was as efficient as ever, having organized a great HPC Symposium for about fifty customers from across Asia South.

Singapore Airlines deserves special mention for making my 11 hour flight to Paris as restful as an 11 hour flight can be. I stepped off the plane at 6:30 am and about half a dozen customer meetings later stepped into my hotel room at about 9 pm and collapsed. Luckily I had a late start the next morning and felt recovered after my first full night of sleep of the week. I sincerely thank Europe's PRACE Project for extending their vendor briefings an additional day to meet with me.

Having enjoyed favorable tail winds most of the week, it was now time for payback and my flight back to Chicago, at over 9 hours, was considerably late. At the risk of spreading one of the best kept secrets of international travel, the US Global Entry program got me past a huge line of several hundred travelers and through immigration and customs, and despite United's txt msg that I was rebooked I had glimmers of making my final flight home. Alas, the train from Chicago's terminal 5 to terminal 2 was even more crowded, as was the security line, and I missed my connection. Luckily, United had already rebooked me on a flight only 90 minutes later, and I was soon home.

Next week, I'm staying in California. Maybe even for two weeks :)

For your weekend viewing pleasure, enjoy this video by Professor Thomas Lippert discussing the new Sun Constellation System supercomputer at the Julich Supercomputer Centre in Germany.

While on the topic of corporate blogs, I should point out one of my favorite corporate blog sites - besides blogs.sun.com of course - and that is blogs.amd.com. AMD's Chief Marketing Office Nigel Desseau definitely learned a thing or two about blogging during his years at Sun and celebrated the 6th anniversary of AMD's Opteron processor with his blog post yesterday.

Nigel yesterday highlighted AMD's most energy efficient processor to date, their latest quad core, 40 watt processor. Nigel's blog linked to plenty of benchmarks and that is really important. Anyone can build a low power processor, and I'm always amazed by naive remarks that look simply at processor wattage. It is, of course, the performance per watt that counts, and don't forget to throw in other power hungry components like memory. Many servers today consume more power for the memory subsystem than by their CPUs, and different memory types have different power consumption. Anyhow, Nigel touted the new 40 watt processor as ideal for scale-out cloud computing deployments, and I'll add like the Sun Cloud.

AMD announced much more than just a new low power processor, however, the most exciting thing for me was news on their upcoming six-core Istanbul processor. I've embedded AMD's presentation below so you can read about Istanbul for yourself. Istanbul is socket compatible with existing AMD Barcelona series processors so I would expect to see Istanbul showing up as an option in most existing AMD based servers. However, as HPC users know, a faster processor alone isn't enough. With faster processors you will need faster storage like our Sun Lustre Storage System as well as faster InfiniBand and 10GbE networking.

And of course, whenever I mention one of our x86 CPU partners, the other one asks for equal time, so be sure to check out blogs.intel.com too.

Peter Bojanic kicked off the morning with news that Lustre 2.0 Alpha is now available for download. We really want to get community feedback early and often. We will be releasing new builds every 4-6 weeks. We expect to be starting a formal beta in several months, let us know if you are interested.

If you have not visited lately, check out the new and improved Lustre.org site where you can find the latest Lustre roadmap, an updated Lustre hardware support matrix, and a number of different white papers and training material.

Sun announced a number of new products today that weren't HPC focused, but at our Open Network Systems launch event at Sun's North America Partner summit in Las Vegas the talk was sure focused on HPC. Of course, when you get Sun engineers like Andy Bechtolsheim, Jeff Bonwick (inventor of ZFS), and Michael Cornwell (Sun's chief flash technologist) on stage for an unscripted talk with John Fowler, what else would you expect.

Of course as interesting as the discussion was, what really makes an HPC product is its performance, and our new Open Network Systems come complete with benchmark proof points that these new systems are absolutely the best HPC servers in the world using Intel's new Xeon 5500 (aka Nehalem) CPUs. While every major vendor has announced Nehalem based systems, only Sun:

Is delivering up to 96 two-socket nodes in a standard 24" rack using our new x6275 server module

Is delivering on-board QDR InfiniBand, providing each two-socket node in the x6275 full 40 GB/sec network bandwidth

Is delivering on-board SSD-flash accelerated storage, providing the equivalent performance of 100 disk drives

Is delivering in-chassis QDR IB switching, with our QNEM supporting large Torus or full fat tree (with external core switches) IB fabrics of > 5000 nodes with a 6x cable reduction versus traditional IB switches

Needless to say, everyone in the Sun HPC community is excited about these products. The new Sun Constellation System components are being delivered today, and thanks to the ease of use our Sun HPC Software Stack you can start gaining immediate productivity improvements from your new system today!

In the world of High Performance Computing, no problem is growing faster today than the need to deal with ever increasing amounts of data. At the Pacific Rim Neuroimaging Conference today, every presenter discussed some aspect of this problem. Not only are new imaging sensors producing ever higher data resolutions, but studies are combining more samples, from more data sources, over longer periods of time to study the human brain and gain important new insights into a variety of diseases.

So it is only appropriate that today we published a new Sun Blueprint on the Solving the HPC I/O Bottleneck: Sun Lustre Storage System. Look for more information on the new Sun Lustre Storage System at our Open Network Systems webcast and product launch tomorrow.

Following up this week's launch, you can join the 2009 Sun Lustre User Group (LUG) meeting being held in California. As much as I'd love to spend more time at the Pacific Rim Neuroimaging Conference in Hawaii, I'll be headed off tonight to join our Open Network Systems Launch in Las Vegas then going to the Lustre User Group and hope to meet many of my blog readers at one of these events.

Mahalo for now and hope to see you soon.

On a trip through the UK last week, I took time out to talk to Martin Courtney of the UK's Computing.com about HPC and Cloud Computing. Martin definitely got the message. One of the biggest challenges to large scale adoption of cloud computing is getting software to work in the cloud. To date, using Google or Amazon's Cloud meant you had to modify your software with Google or Amazon specific code. But what if the software you already used, like your database, your application server, or your office suite already worked with a Cloud? Better yet, what if it worked with a cloud and was based on open standards, so if you wanted to switch to a different cloud you would not be stuck with a high cost of exit? Those are exactly some of the ideas behind Sun's new Cloud Computing offerings.

While other companies are cutting back their HPC investments, Sun continues to invest in HPC systems, storage, networking, and software to address the world's toughest HPC problems. Be it building an entry level cluster or the world's largest supercomputer, the Sun Constellation System is up to the task. Later this month, we will be announcing the newest upgrades to the Sun Constellation System line, providing significant new performance boosts not only in CPU power, but in storage and networking performance. We have already sold PetaFlops of Sun Constellation Systems attached to PetaBytes of storage. Now we've put together a global HPC Sales team to help bring Sun Constellation System to an event broader set of commercial, education, and research HPC customers, and I'm really excited to be leading that new team.

Customers selecting Sun Constellation System for their HPC infrastructure are choosing the world's most open HPC platform. From our Lustre file system that powers over half the world's fastest supercomputers, to industry standard networking and CPU options, Sun Constellation System is built on open standards and open source software. And now, you'll also get the world's best HPC sales team working with you to solve your toughest HPC problems.

Catch a sneak peak of our April 14 Open Network Computing launch.

Sun Campus Ambassadors Alper Celik and Gokhan Dogan caught up with me during Sun's European Education and Research Conference to talk about HPC and ask my advice to college students.

If you couldn't make it to Berlin, follow Sun's European Education and Research Conference blog and participate in the conference. View the full agenda for the conference.

Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the conference with a video greeting, reaffirming Sun's commitment to education.

Joe Hartley, VP of Global Education and Research for Sun opened the conference and invited a campus ambassadors from one of our Open Source University Meetup, or OSUM (pronounced "awesome") groups to speak about the WaterWell Project. As Joe said, when we first started the campus ambassador program, we never envisioned it would inspire students to work on projects like this which aim to address water quality monitoring in developing countries using SunSpot sensor technology.

The second campus ambassador guest, Alper Celik, is working on a project to create a router using commodity Sun servers and the OpenSolaris CrossBow technology, and has a business plan to productize it. If only Michael Dell had OpenSolaris when he started. My apologies to our campus ambassadors, your names flashed up on the screen too quickly for me to write it down. Leave me a comment and I will update the text.

Joe then talked about some examples of participating in communities via FaceBook. So you guessed it, lets see what happens with the FaceBook group I just created, "Sun EERC 2009". Joe also gave an update on Sun's Cloud Strategy.

Peter Tandy from Sun now presenting on the New Paradigm in Managing Data: Sun's Open Storage Strategy. I better listen as I have some storage slides in my presentation for tomorrow and don't want to repeat anything.

Speaking of my presentation, I do have it loaded on the Sun Cloud and if the A/V folks let me, will do a live demo tomorrow of OpenOffice "open from cloud" and do my presentation from the cloud.

Peter giving a great overview of Sun's open storage strategy and products. Talking about how SSD-Flash technology is changing the economics of storage. We of course have standard form factor SSD-Flash disks in our Sun Storage 7000 appliance today as well as for many of our commodity servers, but not everyone has a spare disk slot in their server. So we will be putting flash into a lot of different form factors, if everyone shows up on time for my opening talk tomorrow, I might even give a sneak peak at one of our future SSD-Flash products.

Next up, Future of Storage and Data Management by Professor Alexander Reinefeld – Head of Computer Science, Zuse-Institute Berlin In case you don't recognize the name Konrad Zuse Wonderful presentation on the challenges with data explosion. A good overview of Scalaris a scalable, transactional, distributed key-value store developed at Zuse. You know it must be good if there is a Google Code project for it.

Closing talk of the day, Collaborative Environments and Collaboration Tools for Distributed Work Projects Steve Heller – Sun Lab's Director Principal Investigator Collaborative Environments. Always amazing to hear all the things going on at Sun Labs. Perhaps a bit late in the day for Fortress Code example on computational gradient, but yes, the Fortran code is a lot worse. But Molecule Visualization by Free University Berlin using Project Wonderland was pretty cool.

Well, I'm just itching to share more details on the Sun Constellation System supercomputer that Australia's Bureau of Meteorology recently purchased. Unfortunately I'll have to wait a bit longer as the system contains a number of components we can't publically discuss until they are announced by their respective vendors. The field of Weather and Ocean Modeling has long been dominated by proprietary supercomputer systems such as NEC SX and IBM Power systems, so one has to conjecture that the Intel Nehalem CPUs in the Bureau of Meteorology's new system must have fared pretty well in benchmarks. Of course, Intel would prefer to wait until their public launch of Nehalem to say exactly how well. However, it does appear that the long standing dominance of proprietary systems in climate modeling has neared its end.

This should come to no surprise to Sun HPC followers. After all, it was the Sun-powered TSUBAME supercomputer at Tokyo Institute of Technology that first pushed NEC's Earth Simulator off the map as Japan and Asia Pacific's fastest supercomputer in 2006. And Ranger, the Sun Constellation System installed at TACC in early 2008 has been used for many climate modeling tasking, including

tornado simulation. Of course the Sun Constellation System architecture is not just about compute power, it includes powerful open storage components based on Sun's Lustre parallel file system (which, notably is also used in some of IBM's largest supercomputers), and InfiniBand networking. So expect Sun to be following up Intel's Nehalem launch with our own Sun Constellation System updates, including even more scalable storage and networking. For now, you will just have to trust the Aussies on how good it really is!

As promised, here is a diagram that help explain a bit more about our new Virtual NEM. The diagram focuses on the Virtual NEM's 10GbE capabilities, the SAS external storage functionality is not shown in this diagram.

The Virtual NEM can be connected externally to one or two 10 GbE network switch ports. These external 10 GbE links are then shared by up to 10 blades using virtual NICs. When using a single 10 GbE connection, the Inter ASIC Link (IAL) connects the two halves of the virtual NIC. When using two 10 GbE connections, the Virtual NEM can be configured so that each set of 5 blades shares one of the 10 GbE connections, providing a total of 20 Gb of bandwidth. The IAL also supports dynamic failover so that if one of your two 10 GbE connection fails, the Virtual NIC will automatically switch over the 5 blades on the failed connection to the other half of the Virtual NIC. This makes it quite simple to build highly available networks by connecting the Virtual NEM to two separate external switches.

The virtual NIC allows each blade to be configured with a 10 GbE driver and 10 GbE port and each blade can run at full 10 GbE speeds although the total bandwidth at any one time is limited to either 10 or 20 Gb. Almost no servers require dedicated, constant 10 GbE traffic, but many modern servers can drive short bursts of 10 GbE traffic.

In addition to the two 10 GbE ports, the Virtual NEM also includes (not shown):

ten 1 GbE pass-thru connections (one for each blade)

Dual path SAS external storage links for each blade slot

The Virtual NEM is hot pluggable into the Sun Blade 6000 chassis which supports single or dual Virtual NEM configurations. The Virtual NEM is passively cooled for high availability (no fans to fail). A web based management interface along with command line interface make setup and monitoring simple.

Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware are all supported by the Virtual NEM hardware, although customers will have to wait approximately 60 days for the VMware driver to be completed. We have tested the Virtual NEM with a wide variety of 3rd party 10 GbE switches including Cisco, Foundry, Force10, Extreme, Fujitsu, HP ProCurve, and Arista Networks.

Two of the hottest topics in IT today are blade servers and virtualization. Of course hot topic sometimes translates with vendors into expensive. Some companies charge up to $4000 per network switch port for each server. That is really a lot when you consider many blade servers cost less than $4000. Seems like some networking companies want to change IT economics by making the blade server more expense. I guess that is one way to make that $4000 per network switch port look less expensive. Of course you can really only charge that sort of premium pricing if you have a proprietary vendor lock-in. Since open source and open standards are at the heart of Sun's business, when we claim to be changing the economics of IT we are thinking about driving the price the other direction ... down.

Sun's new Virtual NEM (Network Express Module) is an incredibly cost efficient way to connect multiple blade servers to networks and I/O. With a list price of less than $500 per blade server, Sun's new Virtual NEM reduces cabling by 10:1, eliminates management and interoperability problems, and provides wire speed 10GbE performance to each blade. Our virtual NEM not only runs with the latest AMD and Intel based Sun Blade modules running Solaris, Linux, or Windows, it also works with our SSD Flash accelerated UltraSPARC blades and is ready to work with Intel's soon to be announced Nehalem CPUs. Even if you have been happy with the performance of 1GbE ethernet, get ready to upgrade to 10GbE. Technology marches on and CPU advances like the hardware multi-threading in Sun's 8-core UltraSPARC T2 processor and Intel's 4-core Nehalem processor, along with SSD Flash acceleration that Sun is shipping today on blades, ensures 10GbE will become a common requirement soon for more and more blades.

Of course blades don't need to connect just to networks and network storage like the Sun Storage 7000. Sometimes you need to directly connect your blades to storage. HP charges nearly an extra $4000 for their blade SAS switch to connect blades to external shared storage, functionality you get included in the base price with Sun's Virtual NEM.

So it is pretty simple. If you need easy and affordable blade networking and I/O, check out Sun blade servers with our new Virtual NEM.

Cloud computing is certainly a hot topic these days. No matter if you are thinking of using a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid, the real question is can your software and applications work in a cloud? Today Sun opened up our cloud platform. If you are using Solaris, our open storage software, MySQL database, Lustre file system, OpenOffice, or Glassfish app server, your software is already designed to work in a cloud. Learn more about why Sun's cloud computing platform is the world's most popular open cloud computing platform.