Marc Hamilton's Weblog
Sun xVM Server Sneak Peak
Sun xVM Server is still under development. Early releases will be available late in the Summer of 2008. Until then you can get a sneak peek of some of the early user interface page designs.
Posted at 09:05AM Jun 27, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[0]
Favorite Runs - Dresden Germany
One of my easiest to navigate runs, starting from the Westin Hotel in Dresden Germany. Go out the back door of the hotel, walk a few feet to the beautiful Elbe River that runs along the historic old town, and turn left or right. You can run for miles along the river in either direction. This morning was near perfect running weather, 15 degrees and light rain. I've been coming to Dresden this time of year for 3 years now, and this morning was the first time I turned right. You run by several marinas and riverfront clubs like CityBeach Dresden. Now time to listen to Andy Bechtolsheim kick off day two of our HPC Consortium meeting.
Posted at 12:06AM Jun 16, 2008 by marchamilton in Running |
HPCVL's New T5140 Cluster
Here is what our press release said about the new UltraSPARC T2 Plus powered compute cluster at HPCVL, one of Canada's leading HPC research centers. If you prefer to hear what HPCVL is doing with the nearly 10,000 compute threads in their new cluster, visit HPCVL's web site which has quite a bit more information. Better yet, attend Sun's HPC Consortium meeting, being held next weekend prior to next week's International Supercomputer Conference. Ken Edgecombe, Director of HPCVL will be there describing early experiences with their new cluster which was installed several months ago. Karl Schulz, Associate Director of TACC will be there, talking about the ground-breaking work TACC had done this year with the world's most powerful x86 based supercomputer. Sign up for our NDA session and you can hear Sun co-founder and Chief Architect Andy Bechtolsheim talk about what new developments Sun is working on for even more powerful supercomputers. It promises to be a great weekend and a busy week.
Posted at 07:08AM Jun 10, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]
Web Scale Infrastructure
Even a lot of Sun employees ask me how many customers really need a 1RU server with 128 threads like our T5140. Lots of customers building web scale infrastructure, that is who. Many people have heard about Twitter. Started out as a site that posted short txt messages sent from your cell phone. I'm sure the original site designers sat down and thought about how many users they would get if they were wildly successful, how fast you can type on a cell phone, calculated the max txt message size ... well you get the picture. But just in the last few weeks, we have seen new ways to "tweet" as they say. There is the BeTwittered app that lets you send a tweet directly from your iGoogle home page. Not to be outdone, you can now load a Facebook widget that automatically sends your Facebook status updates to Twitter. I'm sure there are many other ways today to send in your tweets as well. So more and more, my iGoogle BeTwittered widget times out and doesn't load and when I go directly to twitter.com this is becoming more common:
Not to be outdone by fancy new social networking startups, Amazon.com showed signs of growing popularity too today with a friendly page stating,
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.
Just two ever more recurring examples of growing web scale infrastructure needs. So next time someone asks me how many T5140's does Sun really think it well sell, I'll ask them to go try to figure out how many requests a second they think a site like Twitter or Amazon needs to process.
Posted at 11:36AM Jun 06, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[3]
OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta Feedback
I've been using the new OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta for about a week now, and would highly recommend it, especially for Mac users. I work with literally dozens of spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents a day, and do 100% of it with OpenOffice, switching between a Mac laptop, an x86 laptop running OpenSolaris, and SunRay thin clients including one in my home office. But let me focus on the Mac version as that is where the biggest usability improvements are.
First the install. After downloading, you simply drag the OpenOffice icon to the Mac applications folder and everything else is automagically setup for you, just like you would expect on a Mac. The previous version of OpenOffice is renamed to OpenOffice 2.2 in your Apps folder in case you need to use it (100's of files with 3.0 and I have not had to go back once). All existing OpenOffice files, mail attachments, web links, etc. are automatically updated to open with OpenOffice 3.0 so no additional setup is needed.
Rather than requiring X11, which, while available on the Mac OS DVD, is not installed by default (which can be problematic for those of us who always misplace media), OpenOffice runs natively on the Mac window system. That means you get all the OpenOffice menus on the Mac menu bar instead of the X11 window menu bar. Lets face it, 99% of today's Mac users have never used X11 and while user interface design purists may argue that a global menu bar is not good interface design, it is hard to argue with the popularity of the Mac guy.
Finally, perhaps my favorite improvement, OpenOffice 3.0 now uses the Mac's "Apple" key for all menu shortcuts, versus the Control key used by previous versions. Finally, millions of neurons and synapses freed up by no longer having to remember to use Control-
Try it out, always free, always open source, OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta, for OpenSolaris, as well as your favorite non open source operating systems (including, if you must, Windows).
Posted at 08:42PM Jun 03, 2008
by marchamilton in General |
Comments[1]
On Changes in Sun's Global Sales and Services Organization
Sun announced today several changes to its Global Sales and Services organization. Those that follow Sun's executive management should not find it surprising that within minutes of the obligatory SEC Filings our CEO was sharing his thoughts via his blog and via an internal video (not posted here) and introducing Peter Ryan, our new head of sales, to all employees via an online video. I've had the pleasure of working directly for Peter in my current role and couldn't be more please about him being selected to lead our entire sales and services organization.
Posted at 06:45PM Jun 02, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Big Buck Bunny and Web 3.0
Some computer companies are still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 is all about. One competitor recently announced they were merging their HPC and and Web 2.0 team into a new scalable datacenter infrastructure team. At Sun, we have long known that the technologies that often are first proved out by HPC Research Centers quickly find their way into web infrastructure applications. For instance, Sun's Lustre file system, used by 7 of the Top 10 supercomputers and approximately half of the Top 500 was already being used by some of China's largest web companies several years ago. Web startups small and large, especially those in countries like China, Russia, India, and Brazil, have made it a habit to keep their initial costs low by using free and open source software like Lustre and Sun's MySQL database. And most HPC sites use MySQL somewhere too.
So what about Web 3.0? At Sun, we just see Web 3.0 as the natural evolution of Web 2.0. On the web front of the equation, it is all about people doing more online. Do you Twitter from your Facebook page, use the BeTwittered widget from your iGoogle home page, the old fashion way from your cell phone, or all of the above? Or have you moved on to using Twitpic? If all of this sounds Greek to you, you probably don't work on my solutions team. But people are doing a lot more than just uploading txt msgs or grainy cell phone videos on the web, check out this animated film on Vimeo. The animated video was rendered on Network.Com. So is that an HPC or a Web app? It is both, of course.
Posted at 08:23AM Jun 02, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[1]
NASA's Phoenix Probe Lands on Mars
And speaking of NASA, the Phoenix probe landed on Mars today.
Posted at 05:57PM May 25, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Not Your Father's NASA
An interesting Wired article on NASA, not to be confused with OpenNasa.com.
Worthwhile reading for anyone over 30 who knows, works with, or interacts with anyone under 30. Myself? Getting ready to make homemade enchiladas cause my wife is out with friends and my teenage daughter and son are both having their Gen-Y friends over for dinner.
Posted at 05:40PM May 23, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
What Is Our Most Popular Product This Month?
Let me give you some clues. Earlier this week Sun announced a number of new servers supporting AMD's latest quad core "Barcelona" processors like the Sun Fire x4140, with eight cores, 16 DIMM slots, and 8 internal drives with over 1 TB of storage capacity in a compact 1RU form factor and its big brother, the
Sybase certainly thought so, they recently set a Guinness World Record for the world's largest database, over 1 PetaByte of data and over six trillion rows of transaction data. Now that is a big database. What server did they choose to set this world record with? Sun's M9000. OK, so most users of Sun's MySQL database may be more interested in a
x4440 and a
Guinness beer, I'm not sure there are any 1 PetaByte MySQL databases yet. But I wouldn't bet against MySQL moving into this range in the future. Meanwhile, lots of customers who need to run really large databases and other open systems applications are turning to the capabilities of Sun's M9000.
Congratulations to Sybase on their new world record! Now I think I'll grab my Guinness, the liquid one not the hardback.
Posted at 08:32PM May 16, 2008
by marchamilton in General |
Download OpenSolaris Now at OpenSolaris.com
Everyone on the planet can now get OpenSolaris from:
The OpenSolaris 2008.05 release is no longer just for developers, it now comes with two subscription support offerings from Sun Services, OpenSolaris Essentials Subscription Support and OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support .
Posted at 08:01AM May 05, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
VirtualBox 1.6 and OpenSolaris RC3
I had a spare moment this weekend, so I downloaded the newest release of VirtualBox for my Mac. While a lot of people may use VirtualBox to run Windows on their Mac, I decided to try out the latest release candidate, RC3, for OpenSolaris running in VirtualBox. At the same time I installed OpenSolaris RC3 on an extra AthlonX2 laptop.
If you are not a Sun employee, you will have to wait a bit longer to try out the latest OpenSolaris, but not too long. I expect we had plenty of copies to hand out this weekend at the second OpenSolaris Developer Summit. I love the new OpenSolaris background and menu graphics. The graphics even caught my teenage son's attention as he walked by, "much cooler than your old Solaris", he mentioned.
Like the two earlier OpenSolaris Developer Previews, OpenSolaris RC3 fits on a CD and live boots. I was even able to live boot it on my Mac! Very cool. It should be an interesting week at JavaOne, kicking of tomorrow with CommunityOne
Posted at 04:55PM May 04, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Cinco de OpenSolaris
Living in Southern California, there is no lack of reminders that next Monday is Cinco de Mayo. But while I love Mexican food, on Monday I'll be celebrating at CommunityOne, or Cinco de OpenSolaris as I would rather call it. Here is a quick clip of over 100 Cinco de OpenSolaris fans who live very far away from Mexico celebrating the first release candidate.
No, OpenSolaris is definitely not your father's Solaris. Except perhaps for Chase.
Posted at 09:13AM May 01, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Favorite Runs - Ipanema Beach
Three flights, three business dinners, three cities, two analyst lunches and no running, I finally found my way to what I had been looking forward to all week. I checked into my hotel in Rio De Janeiro last night after 11 pm, left the curtains open, and awoke early this morning facing a beautiful view of my running path. Unlike some of my other favorite runs requiring elaborate directions, this one is easy, walk out of hotel, cross street, turn left or right, and run. The LED sign at the corner read 6:09 and 21 degrees, but the shade soon turned to bright sun and the next sign already read 24. I started slowly, paying for my sins of over-indulging in Brazilian seafood last night, not to mention three days with no exercise. But after about a mile, my usual pace returned.
Ipanema is a beautiful, wide, sandy beach, with both a coblestoned walking path and a smooth paved bike path running between the beach and the road. The small coblestones did not make for great running, but I quickly noticed that with few bikers out, most joggers were taking advantage of the bike path so I soon switched. The road was already filling with morning commuters, but thanks to the widespread use of flexfuel engines and gas stations selling alcohol based fuel for less than half the price of gasoline, I was not bothered by exhaust fumes. I should cross-post on Greenmonk, Rio is such a better place for conventions than Vegas for so many reasons.
I was going to try a technology free blog, but can´t resist. The Eco computing movement is not as prevelant in Brazil, the land of mainframes, as elsewhere. Not one single customer told me they were using mainframes to save energy. I find it striking that a country with one of the largest open source communities in the world is also one of the biggest users of mainframes. Of course the mainframe legacy is easily explained by anyone who has studied the history of the IT industry in Brazil, having been closed to most computer imports through the mid-eighties, Brazilian companies shunned locally produced minicomputers for mainframes. That legacy still lives on in many large companies here, but I have to wonder for how long? How many Brazilian open source programmers are developing for the mainframe? Even a large bank I met with yesterday commented that while they ran DB2 on the mainframe, it was increasingly hard to find DB2 developers and administrators while everyone they had hired in the last few years knew MySQL. I told the customer not to hold their breath for a mainframe port of MySQL.
Posted at 04:33AM Apr 25, 2008 by marchamilton in Running | Comments[3]
What To Do With 10,000 Threads of T5140
There has been lots of great blogs by Sun engineers on the capabilities and features of the new T5140 server and UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor announced this week. Take a look at what one large HPC customer, Canada's High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory is doing with their 10,000 thread cluster, aptly named Victoria Falls.
Posted at 10:52AM Apr 11, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Change is Good
It was a big day for changes today. Sun released their first two socket CMT (Chip Multi Threading) servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. There are dozens of Sun engineer blogs today going into tons of technical detail, but for those of you perhaps less familiar with CMT I thought I would give a brief overview.
Almost all modern microprocessors today are multi-core, that is they have two or more CPU cores packaged into a single chip which fits into a socket on your computer. Until just a few years ago, that was not the case. In part, what enables multi-core and CMT processors is Moore's Law which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will roughly double every 18 months (as the transistor size shrinks by half due to process improvements). For at least twenty years, ending in about 2005, companies that designed CPUs focused primarily on the smaller transistor size and larger transistor count to run their CPUs at a faster clock rate. But this had diminishing returns. Many of us remember upgrading our 1 GHz PC for a 2 GHz PC, only to find that our web browser or word processor really didn't run much faster. While there are many application bottlenecks (such as getting data from the network and reading or writing to your disk drive), the main thing that slows down most applications is reading and writing data to your system's memory. And memory speeds have only doubled every six years or so, meaning that buying a processor that ran at a 2x clock rate, when your application was limited by memory speeds, did little to improve overall performance. So for twenty years, microprocessor designers focused on a technique called instruction level parallelism to actually get more work done as the CPU speed increased. Basically, instruction level parallelism looks for opportunities to execute different parts of the same computer instruction in parallel. But as clock rates get into multi-gigahertz, even the best instruction level parallelism can't keep up, at least says some of the best known computer architects in the world, like John Hennessy.
If you don't recognize the name, John Hennessy, is President of Stanford University and one of the best known professors of electrical engineering and computer science thanks to his seminal textbook Computer Architecture: A Quantitive Approach. Professor Hennessy gave a talk at USC in 2005 which I attended with my teenage daughter (who isn't particularly into computer architecture). In his talk, he called 2005 the end of the road for instruction level parallelism. He then went on to describe Sun's Niagara 1 (UltraSPARC T1) processor, which would soon become the world's first processor to have eight cores each being able to execute 4 separate programs, or threads, in parallel. Rather than look for diminishing opportunities to execute parts of the same instruction in parallel, the Niagara processor does almost no instruction level parallelism but executes entire programs, or threads, in parallel, up to 32 in the original Niagara 1 processor. My daughter left the talk rather excited saying, "dad, now I understand what Sun is doing and why you get so excited about it".
Sun subsequently open sourced the design of the Niagara processor then went on to build the Niagara 2 (UltraSPARC T2) processor, which is able to run a total of 64 threads in parallel, 8 each on its 8 cores. Today, Sun launched the T5140 and T5240 servers, the world's first two socket CMT servers. Powered by two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, these servers can execute an amazing 128 threads at the same time. So, you might ask, why would you ever need 128 threads on your desktop? I can think of one thread to run my word processor, one to be download a web page in the background, and if I'm feeling really creative maybe another thread to be encoding a video. But 128 threads, who needs that?
The answer, of course, is that you don't need 128 threads today on your desktop, but lots of server applications can use this many threads and more. Think of a web server responding to 128 page view requests or a server running Sun's MySQL database updating 128 bank account records, or just about anything else you would do on the web today. We have been quietly shipping these servers for several weeks already, and plenty of customers have had a chance to find things to do with their 128 threads. HPCVL, one of Canada's regional HPC centers is already using several dozen of these servers to run their highly threaded HPC applications. If you are wondering how it might work for you, you can try one free for sixty days, we even pay the return shipping if you don't end up buying it.
One thing to note, your operating system will have to know how to effectively handle 128 threads. Unless you are using Solaris, the operating system you are probably using on your x86 server most likely handles no more than 8 or perhaps 16 threads effectively. Luckily, Sun's Solaris operating system has been able to run powerful servers with this many threads for years and helps you get the maximum performance out of your T5140 or T5240 server. In the same 1RU or 2RU space of a typical x86 server, you can get five times or more the performance. Of course no single server or CPU is optimized for all applications, so we still will keep building our other servers, including our M9000 server (which runs up to 256 threads using a more conventional 64-socket SMP design) and our AMD and Intel powered rack mount and blade servers. In fact, I'm headed to Intel's Portland engineering center later this week to give a talk to some of their engineers. Not on the T5140 of course, but on Solaris. While Intel's current 4 core processors only run 1 thread per core today, Intel has certainly talked about their plans to build CPUs with more cores and more threads per core, which is exactly why they are spending so much time working with Sun engineers to optimize Solaris for their current and future x86 based CPUs.
And on the topic of change is good, I decided to change my hair style today. Actually, I lost a bet which is why I ended up with this change.
Posted at 11:49PM Apr 09, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]
April 9th NYC Product Launch
Two redeye flights in three days and I'm in NYC, meeting with customers prior to tomorrow's big product launch event. Our sun.com/launch page will be updated tomorrow with all the details, but I expect a lot of the really interesting details will be posted at blogs.sun.com by actual engineers who worked on the projects being launched.
Rick Hetherington, VP and co-CTO of Sun Microelectronics and Massood Heydari, VP SPARC Volume Systems will hold a live technical chat at 12 noon EDT on April 9th that you won't want to miss. You can also catch up with the launch tomorrow on Second Life.
Posted at 09:25AM Apr 08, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Spotting Trends
When my two teenage kids tell me I haven't updated my blog for a while, it is a clear sign of a trend I need to reverse. Having just finished up my first quarter leading our systems sales organization for the Americas, I've had a chance to see on a daily basis the buying trends of our customers. Of course, I'll have to wait until after we announce our quarterly earnings to talk about last quarters trends in the Americas. But after a quarter of hard work, and it being the kids Spring break, we headed to Hawaii this week for a little R&R.
Before I left, I stopped by a retail outlet of my wireless carrier and purchased a USB wireless data card. I need to read email in so many different airports, hotels, and customer sites that still don't have WiFi access that I decided the investment would be well worth it. This week alone I have easily paid for my first month's service costs with the saving. Hard to say which trend will be more popular in the future, WiFi or Cellular Wireless Data, but it is nice to have a wide variety of choices. More on hotels later.
As for trends, you can tell interesting ones running the backroads of Hawaii. By today's count, RedBull is clearly the drink of choice based on the roadside litter. While not personally a fan of energy drinks, I do like the RedBull brand. What other energy drink sponsors their own Formula 1 racing team?
Of course, I do have to tie this back to computers. RedBull Racing uses a lot of computers to design their racing cars, perfect customer to consider our Sun Constellation System high performance computing solution built around the Sun Blade 6048. Of course, these days, a lot of different customers are buying the Sun Blade 6048 besides HPC users like TACC. We sold several Sun Blade 6048 systems to a customer in the Middle East to run a large retail point of sale system with SunRay ultra-thin clients as the front end. Talk about fast service, how would you like your retail transaction to be processed on a SunRay powered by the same system that runs one of the world's fastest supercomputers. We have also sold Sun Blade 6048 systems to a large organization involved in aircraft design. I guess if you can design jet aircraft on Sun Blade 6048's they should be fast enough to design cars, after all, even slow jets go faster than fast Formula 1 cars. And yes, we have even sold Sun Blade 6048's to other traditional HPC centers including a national HPC research center in Asia and one in Europe.
Back to slower transport, longtime readers of my blog will recognize that if I'm in Hawaii, I must be doing one of my favorite runs. Unfortunately, our favorite hotel the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel is closed for renovations following structural damage in the last earthquake. We actually tried a larger, more luxurious hotel nearby. Unfortunately it didn't compare and my wife, ever the good shopper, spotted an add in the local newspaper for a ridiculously low rate for "best available room" at a nearby "thatched hut on the beach" resort and we decided to try it out. I'm writing this from my beachfront thatched hut, about 20 feet from the high tide line, in fact in one of the best rooms (or huts) at the resort. Sometimes you just get lucky. We will make do with the single bathroom. Having just run 10 miles, the rest of my family will ensure I get my turn at the shower before dinner. And yes, my wireless data card works here, and there is no WiFi (or wired Internet) access.
That's it for today's trends. Check back after May 1 for more info on the sales trends we saw in the Americas last quarter, but suffice it to say that we not only sold AMD and Intel based servers, we sold Niagara and Niagara 2 based CMT (Chip Multi-Threading Servers), along with high end SPARC servers like the 64 processor Sun Enterprise M9000 (yes, we still make lots of big SPARC SMP servers that are great for running your SAP or Oracle applications on).
Posted at 09:34PM Apr 03, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]
The Year of Open Storage
If you click on the "Resources" tab on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid User Portal you will quickly notice that TACC's Ranger supercomputer has 2x the CPU power, 2x the memory, and 2x the storage of the previous 17 NSF TeraGrid funded systems combined. This rapid advance in supercomputer power has been enabled, in part, by open computing. The Ranger system uses the same AMD Opteron quad core CPUs that you will very shortly be able to buy from every major vendor, the same type of memory that goes into over 7 million x64 servers a year, and disk drives that are sold by the millions, all used in conjunction with open source software like Sun Grid Engine which allows a single compute job to be used by 16 or 16,000 or more of Ranger's approximately 60,000 processor cores. While the more powerful blade servers in Ranger's Sun Blade 6048 chassis cost slightly more, you can buy similar technology from Sun starting from around $1000 such as our Sun Fire x2100. Even computer companies much larger than Sun that make supercomputers based on non industry standard processors and closed-source software can't possibly compete on price because they will never have the volumes that AMD or Intel have with their x64 processors. That is why 406 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are based on the same cluster architecture as Ranger and a similar number of the top 500 are based on Intel or AMD x64 CPU architectures.
So what does that have to do with Open Storage? Storage, including many of Sun's own Storagetek products as well as storage products from virtually all major storage vendors have been based on commodity disk drives, like the ones used in Ranger, but built into proprietary storage arrays, that ran non open source software, and used other proprietary components. Sun's Thumper x4500 storage server (the ones that delivery to Ranger over 35 GB/second using the Sun Lustre file system and 72 low cost arrays with 1.7 PB of capacity) was the first in a new breed of open storage devices, combining the same commodity CPU, memory, and disk drives used in clusters and in fact your everyday server like the x2100. Just how low cost is the x4500? Well, if you are an eligible academic institution, you can buy a 48 TB x4500 for under $25,000 in the US via the Sun Education Essentials Matching Grant Program. Sorry, commercial customers pay a bit more, but we all remember what it was like to be a starving student. So what's next with Open Storage.
The next evolution in Open Storage will be driven by software. Rather than running limited functionality proprietary software, the x4500 run's the open source Solaris operating system. We've created an entire Open Storage Community around Open Solaris, so anyone can write new storage features and quickly and easily deliver them to a wide user base. Or vica versa, you could develop a new storage device and use our Open Storage software to drive it, without writing a single line of your own code. This week, we made another major contribution to the Open Storage community by delivering on our pledge to open source Sun's SamFS and QFS software. This is the software that lets TACC backup Ranger's 1.7 PB of storage to several multi-PB Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular tape libary systems. If you are not familiar with SamFS or QFS, read Margaret's Blog to understand the importance of this latest open source project.
So with an ever growing collection of Open Storage Software available to Sun StorageTek engineers to work with (and since it is open source, engineers from other storage companies too) I predict we will see a dramatic change in range of storage products entering the market this year. It took nearly a decade from the time the first open source cluster system made its way onto the Top500 list to reach the 80%+ share that clusters have today. How long will it take for 80% of the world's storage to reside on new classes of open storage devices? My guess, much less than 10 years. That is because storage capacity has been growing even faster than compute capacity. And just like there is no way that the NSF could have afforded to pay 2x or even 1x what it paid for the last 17 TeraGrid systems combined for Ranger, there is no way that TACC or Facebook or Bank of America can afford to keep all the data they will generate in the coming years on traditional, proprietary, high cost storage devices.
Congrats to the SamFS and QFS team on their Open Source release, and welcome to the new world of Open Storage.
Posted at 09:48PM Mar 20, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[1]
2008 Education Essentials Matching Grant Program
Ever wonder why schools tend to have out of date computer equipment for their students? It isn't always lack of money. Often, part of the problem is vendors who try to dump outdated equipment on schools for a "bargain" price. Of course, thanks to Moore's law, selling last year's model for 30% off, when current models are 2x as fast, isn't really a bargain, is it? Especially when you have to pay to power and cool the system. At Sun, we think every student should have access to the latest hardware, so once again we are running our Education Essentials Matching Grant Program.
The Education Essentials Matching Grant Program is definitely not a program to dump outdated equipment. Qualifying educational institutions can purchase our latest, most power efficient servers like the T5120 with the latest Niagara 2 processor. The T5120, with powerful virtualization features like LDOMs and Solaris Containers is the perfect platform for teaching. A single T5120 can be divided up into dozens of LDOMs and/or Solaris Containers without paying for expensive third party virtualization software, giving each student in a class a virtual OS environment which appears like its own server, right down to being able to reboot independent of other OS images running on the server.
Want an x86 server instead, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program has servers with the latest Intel quad core Xeon processors as well as the latest AMD Opteron systems. And if you need a larger SPARC based server, the newest SPARC M4000 and M5000 servers are available too in this program. But as they say in sales, don't wait, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program ends in June.
Posted at 05:50PM Mar 16, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
TACC Quarterly NSF Review
I'm sitting at the National Science Foundation's quarterly review of Ranger which is now in full production (hint, click on the "Resources" tab). I walked through the amazingly compact data center again early this morning. If a supercomputer can be called beautiful, Ranger is certainly that. What is probably most amazing are the science results that have already been achieved in the first few months of use which several users have presented. But the numbers themselves are also amazing. Ranger has already amassed over 135 TB of data on its Sun Lustre file systems. The largest Lustre filesystem has a capacity of over 800 TB of user accessible space, can store over 470 million individual files (470M inodes), and file system metadata alone takes up 2 TB. More later, but turning back to the next speaker now.
ps, you probably want to know if Ranger passed the full system HPL (Linpack) benchmark of the Top500 list. I'm not going to tell you what the exact results were, you will have to ask TACC, but I am happy to say Ranger passed the HPL target specified in the NSF acceptance tests.
Posted at 12:38PM Mar 05, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[1]
TACC Ranger Dedication Video
Posted at 09:16PM Feb 23, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[3]
New Sun Blade x8450
Sun today announced our newest 4-socket Sun Blade x8450, a no compromises 4-socket blade with 4 quad core Intel Xeon processors and 32 DIMM memory slots. Besides the official product pages, you should also check out the unofficial Sun Blade Blog. This 16 core powerhouse provides all of the performance you would expect from an industry leading 4-socket rack mount server like our 2RU x4450, only in a blade form factor. Sun is the only vendor to provide a 4 socket Intel Xeon quad core server in both a 2RU and a blade form factor. More reasons than ever to choose Sun as your x64 supplier!
Posted at 12:23PM Feb 20, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[1]
More Ranger Facts and Figures
There are more details on TACC's Ranger system here, but some of the highlights worth sharing:
And if that wasn't enough, right down the street is Rudy's Texas Bar-B-Q.
Posted at 10:35PM Feb 06, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[6]
Ranger Goes Live
Ranger, the first Sun Constellation System to go into full user production, is now fully up and running at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Take a look at the NSF TeraGrid User Portal and click on the "Resources" tab to view a live system monitor of the NSF Teragrid resources. With 62976 CPU cores, 504 peak TFlops, 123 TBytes memory, and 1730 TBytes disk, Ranger provides more CPU, memory, and disk resources to NSF TeraGrid users than all other 18 TeraGrid systems!
Posted at 06:06AM Feb 06, 2008 by marchamilton in General |