Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

I joined Sun 00010000 years ago today (16 for my friends who aren't conversant in binary). It seems like just yesterday. January 17, 1994. I can't help but to reminiscent a bit.

I lived in LA then and still do today. I somehow managed to spend more than 730 nights not in LA, at least according to my Starwood frequent guest statement, and that only dates to 1999. More on those two years later.

January 17, 1994 was Martin Luther King Day, a Sun holiday, so my first official day at work I took the day off. Little did I know how many times I would pay back that first day.

January 17, 2010 is a Sunday, and I'm working, starting off yet another round the world business trip

The Internet did exist in 1994, just not many people used it, there were about 15,000 registered host names in January 1994

If you wanted to browse the web in January 1994, you couldn't use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or even Netscape. Netscape wouldn't be started until April of that year. The majority of the people using the Web were using the early Mosaic browser.

One of the things that brought me to Sun was a demonstration of an early version of a project code-named WebRunner which was a new web browser based on a new language which would become the Java language. The Java technology was not announced until some 16 months later, in May 1995.

Eric Schmidt worked at Sun. Yahoo wouldn't be started for another month. It would be more than four years before Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to an entity that wouldn't exist for another month, Google.

I remember saying hi to Eric at a few Sun events. I've been lucky enough to spend countless hours with Andy since he returned to Sun in February of 2004 and spent much of his time focusing on HPC.

InfiniBand networking wouldn't be invented for another six years, meanwhile, most Ethernet networks ran at 10Mbit/sec speeds, or 1000 times slower than today's 10Gbit/sec networks.

Sun was the exclusive computer supplier to the 1994 Soccer World Cup held at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. The Sun powered world cup web site became the most viewed web site in the world. I was a systems engineering manager at Sun in Los Angeles at the time and my team helped ensure the world cup web site operated smoothly through the event.

Sun Canada is the Official Computer Network Server Supplier to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. I was Vice President of North America Systems Sales when we signed the deal, so I'll take a bit of credit, although it really goes to the Sun Canada team.

Have I really spent more than two years in hotel rooms? What countries where those in? Ones I easily remember include Canada, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, China, Japan, UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Israel, and Belgium. That doesn't include vacations or a few that for various reasons will go unnamed.

Solaris 2.3 had just been released (November 1993) and was helping to propel the SPARCcenter 2000, with up to 20 SuperSPARC CPUs, as one of the most powerful Oracle database servers of the day.

Countless Sun tee-shirts, polo shirts, dress shirts, coffee cups, backpacks, boxer shorts (don't sell storage short), jackets (my multiple leather Java jackets all quickly found their way to customers but I am keeping a 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics jacket), and the one give-away my wife does use, the 2001 SunRise Nambé platter.

The one Sun event my wife will always remember, SunRise Paris, costume ball at Versailles

The sigh of relief when Joe Roebuck didn't join Elton John in a piano duet at SunRise in Hawaii

My daughter had not yet turned 3. My son wouldn't be born for several months. My wife, what can I say about someone who has put up with me being gone one eighth of the last sixteen years.

Change is good but I'll never do this again

I will do more of these, Red Sky, although this one is perhaps one of a kind.

What can I say. Its been an awesome ride. I did some fun things before Sun. I'm looking forward to some even more amazing things the next 16 years. Another 16 years from now, I still will be a few years shy of full retirement age. So check back on January 17, 2026 and see what I've been up to.

Whenever a new year or a especially a new decade passes, you find people trying to make predictions of what hot new technology trends will come to pass. Of course, innovation cycles don't always follow calendar years. However, as the first few days of 2010 have come to show, I think it is safe to say we will see an increase in the use of so called cloud computing.

No, Sun did not announce any new Cloud Computing products since the start of the year, but companies as diverse as GM OnStar with it's new Volt app to Google with Nexus One did, with many more new announcements no doubt planned for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES). For while many consumers may think of Google's Nexus One as a smartphone, and no matter how you compare it to the iPhone, one thing is for sure, both the Nexus One and the Chevy Volt will drive increased use of Cloud Computing, not only Google's own cloud, but many other clouds as well hosting some of the 1000's of Android apps.

So if you are one of the lucky ones to have gotten your hands on a Nexus One already, or are a die-hard iPhone user, you no doubt know to go to the Android Market or iTunes to find your apps. That's great for consumers, but where do you go if you are in the market for an enterprise application that runs on the cloud? A Google search for CRM Software returns millions of entries and while I'm sure any IT director thinking of cloud based CRM would no doubt first go to Oracle's CRMonDemand site, even a more specific search for something like farm management software returns over two million results. Is there an Android Market equivalent for enterprise cloud software?

Sensing a business opportunity, a Sun Startup Essentials community member has created GetApp.com. Quietly launched in December, GetApp is a B2B portal focused on enterprise cloud applications and already features over 2200 cloud-ready software applications in 300 categories, including SaaS offerings, cloud images, and virtual appliances. GetApp's objective is pretty simple, help enterprise buyers find cloud applications that fit their needs and generating qualified sales leads for application providers.

Full disclosure, I have no financial interest or other association in GetApp other than the fact that their co-founder, Manuel Jaffrin, used to work for me. I talked to Manuel over the holidays and he shared with me a bit on how their site was doing. First, as you might expect, their site runs totally on the cloud, GetApp doesn't own a single physical server and has zero IT capex expense. The site itself is a showcase for many of the promoted apps. For instance, GetApp uses Kampyle Feedback Analytics to collect, analyze, and manage feedback from customers who visit the site.

So if you didn't get that shiny new smartphone you wanted for the holidays, don't worry, there will be even better ones launched soon. As for a Chevy Volt, I'm afraid I can't help you there, my local dealer already has a long list of deposits each of which could buy you an unlocked Nexus One and an iPhone. On the other hand, if your not just using cloud computing but are a large enterprise or service provider building your own cloud, drop me a note, my team happens do know just a thing or two about building large mission critical data centers, be they for HPC or cloud data centers.

Easy 10 mile run along the beach today.

Ran up the hill to get this view yesterday.

I told a friend of mine yesterday that I was taking the holidays off from blogging but couldn't resist an end-of-year blog.

Anyone in IT a decade ago surely remembers the attention paid to the passing of "Y2K". One Sun employee even wrote a song about it. And on the scientific side of computing, Sandia National Labs was celebrating their recent #1 entry in the Top500 list with the famed ASCI Red supercomputer, reaching a whopping 2.3 TF using 9632 processors.

But as I told my friend, I've been spending the holiday break training for the upcoming LA Marathon and catching up on my holiday reading, courtesy of my wife and two kids. So no surprise, one of the books I read was Born to Run. I have to thank Borje for recommending this book to me last month, but it wasn't until I gave it as a gift to my son, a recent convert to cross-country running, that I took the time to read it myself. Thanks Borje and Evan.

Of course the passing of a decade can't go without some nostalgia, so thanks to my wife I went back several decades to the Apollo program and read Rocket Men. Definitely brought back memories of my days at TRW in the 1980's. As a new hire at TRW, you were indoctrinated into the company's history in the Apollo program, having built the world's first throttable rocket engine used as the lunar lander decent engine. Our new hire film also showed scene after scene of earlier failed rocket launches, reminders of what could happen when things went wrong. While Rocket Men did not discuss it, one of my favorite tidbits of Apollo program history was the role of the TRW-built backup navigation system, a so-called strap down inertial navigation system, in safely bringing back the Apollo 13 spacecraft after its near-devestating accident damaged the primary navigation system and forced the craft to limp-home on minimal power. I guess that strap-down system was the world's first green navigation system.

Last but not least in my holiday reading, a step back to an even earlier day in science, The Age of Wonder, when science and art came together in wonderful ways.

So what will the coming decade bring? As we close this decade, Sandia is still the Top10 of the Top500 list, this time with a Sun Constellation System, aptly named Red Sky (and also one of my most frequently read blog entries for 2009). The Red Sky system, at 423.9 TF, is about 185 times more powerful than the decade-earlier ASCI Red system and in fact it would take only about six Sun Constellation System blades, about 1/8th of a standard 19" computer rack on Red Sky, to equal the total compute power of ASCI Red. While we don't know who will be at the top of the list in 2019, we do expect it won't be a TeraFlop or even at PetaFlop system but in fact an ExaFlop system.

Another topic sure to be top of mind in the coming decade is cloud computing. At the hardware level, many of the architectural concepts of cloud computing were actually first developed in the world of HPC and Top500 system. Quick, without thinking too much, tell me if the picture at the top of this blog is of a leading cloud computing data center or a leading HPC data center? If you recognized the picture as the TACC Ranger system (the #9 entry in the latest Top500 list, and like Sandia's Red Sky, also a Sun Constellation System), you'd be correct. But with 1000's of identical servers connected with a high performance network and multi-petabyte global file system, it also makes a perfect cloud data center. As our soon to be new CEO likes to point out in interviews, the basic hardware concepts of cloud computing, a server connected to the Internet, are not new. In fact, Oracle was one of the pioneers in cloud computing with their earlier Network Computer division. But what IT topic wouldn't be complete without a Bruce Kerr song.

Over the next decade, the computing industry will continue to be challenged to build larger and faster computers. But by and large, the hardware paths to the ExaScale systems of 2019 are well on their way to being designed at semiconductor companies around the world. Many of the greatest computing challenges of the coming decade are likely to be software challenges. For while the peak computing power of microprocessors, servers, and in fact entire HPC or Cloud data centers continues to grow according to Moore's law, getting software to scale is increasingly the greater challenge. Solving those challenges will require ever closer cooperation between hardware architects and software architects. Those in the industry who simplify the coupling of software with hardware are likely to be winners in both HPC and Cloud Computing. I really look forward to blogging about how we solved those challenges in 2019.

Having barely dried out my cloths from last month's SC09 conference in rainy Portland, its time to start thinking ahead to Spring sunshine and the 2010 Lustre User Group meeting in beautiful Monterey Bay. To ensure the conference remains conversational and interactive, registration for this event will be limited to 150 people. We are processing reservations on a first come first served basis, and note that LUG 2009 sold out.

Today, Red Sky, Sandia's Sun Constellation Supercomputer was announced as the 10th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 TFlops. In the time-lapse video below, you can watch the building of Red Sky at Sandia National Laboratories National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Red Sky uses Sun's new 5600 Cooling Door System to achieve new levels of energy efficiency for a system of this size. By Sandia's own calculations, besides energy efficiency, the cooling door system saves over 5 million gallons a year of water compared to traditional air-cooled systems. Now that is green IT!

The latest Top500 list was published today and three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems.

Sandia National Labs Red Sky supercomputer becomes a new system on the Top 10, entering the list at number 10 and edging out last June's number 10 entry the Juelich Juropa supercomputer which moves to 13th position on the Top500. KISTI's Tachyonll supercomputer enters the Top500 list at position 14. Quite amazing for its staying power on the Top500 and testimony to the TACC's Ranger supercomputer, which first appeared on the Top500 list in June 2008 at position 5 finds itself at postion 9 on the current Top500 list.

Other Sun entries in the Top100 included TiTech's TSUBAME system at position 56, and talk about staying power, TSUBAME entered the Top500 in June 2006 at position 7. CLUMEQ enters the list at position 63, and with an entire empty floor of their unique silo data center available for expansion, CLUMEQ is one site Top500 watchers should keep close watch on in the future. USC, despite losing to Stanford in US College Football this weekend, managed position 71, barely ahead of Clemson at position 79. Clemson CTO Jim Pepin won't comment on if he has a personal goal to overtake his longtime previous employer USC on the Top500 list, but one thing is for sure, on a global basis, the Top500 list has for many years created a competitive spirit among commercial, university, and government supercomputer sites and no doubt done a fare amount through that competition to advance the state of the art.

While Sun Constellation Systems have a much briefer history on the Top500 than many other vendors' systems, we are proud to have more than doubled the number of Sun systems on the current list, including an amazing 3 of the top 5 Intel Nehalem based systems.

CLUMEQ recently unveiled Colossus, the largest Sun Constellation System supercomputer in Canada. The video below talks about the building of Colossus, some of the research planned using the new system, and why it is not only the fastest but one of the greenest and most energy efficient supercomputers in Canada.

Many of you know Sun for our High Performance Computing systems. Well, Sun servers, storage, networking, and software are not the only parts of our high performance portfolio, we have some pretty high performance runners too, not to mention some of them are a bit competitive. To get into the competitive high performance spirit for this weekend's SC09 Sun HPC Consortium, we will kick of the day Saturday with a fun, not too competitive run through the streets of Portland. Meet me and some of the team at 6:45 am on Saturday in front of the Hilton Portland Executive Towers. Registration for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium not required, and even IBM and HP runners are welcome to join in. But sorry, only customers and partners registered for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium can join after the run for the real scoop on the latest in HPC.

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What cuts costs of moving to 10GbE by up to 78% and requires only 1/6 the number of cables? Customers who have registered for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium this weekend in Portland will be among the first to find out.

Sun is one of the leading providers of high performance network fabrics including our Magnum line of QDR InfiniBand switches and we have been an innovator in the 10GbE space since we first introduced dual 10Gbit Ethernet directly integrated onto the UltraSPARC-T2 processor several years ago. Many customers already use high performance fabrics like 10GbE with our two socket, 16-core Sun Blade T6340 server module and as Intel and AMD preview upcoming 6, 8, and 12 core CPUs at SC09 and nearly every vendor talks about some sort of GPU integration, we believe the large majority of customers will need to move to high performance fabrics like QDR IB or 10GbE to take advantage of the ever increasing compute power in their servers.

So don't miss out, be the first to hear about our newest 10GbE products, register now for SC09 Sun HPC Consortium. Sorry IBM and HP employees, this event is for Sun customers, partners, and employees only.

Updates on BMW Oracle Racing to ExaScale computing thoughts from Sun's Chief HPC Architect, Andy Bechtolsheim, are just some of the things you will hear about at the upcoming SC09 Sun HPC Consortium being held immediately prior to SC09, November 14-15th in Portland Oregon. An invitation-only mid-week luncheon with Andy and Intel's Stephen Wheat is already sold out, but we still have a few whisper suite sessions available. This year, we have two whisper suites in our booth on the show floor, so you don't even have to leave the convention center to hear about the most exciting HPC updates.

You won't want to miss this exciting event, so register today.

Ever run out space on your digital camera's flash card? Well, this flash won't quite fit in your camera, but at 1.92 TB in 1RU, my good friends at SmugMug will be using their new flash, a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array to store a lot of pictures. Just how fast is it, or how long would it take to store all the pictures from 1000, 2GB digital camera flash cards onto the F5100? Lets just say SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill called it "crazy fast" in his Twitter post. I guess that is a technical term in the photographic industry. All kidding aside, Don, who is clearly an avid photographer, has also been an avid user of Sun technology over the years, and writes about both in his blog. I look forward to hearing about how SmugMug is using their new F5100 in the coming weeks.

I know my gardening friends on the East Coast will have no pity for my late fall challenges.

Some people are still touting Solid State Disks (SSDs) as hot new technology. Meanwhile, many High Performance Computing (HPC) customers have moved on to more innovative uses of flash technology. Come hear what some of our customers are doing with Sun's flash technology like the Sun Storage F5100 at next month's HPC Consortium meeting immediately prior to SC09 conference in beautiful Portland Oregon. Impatient, don't worry, some Sun HPC customers who participated in early testing of the F5100 already have great things to say about it. Customers like Chuck Sears, Manager of Research Computing at Oregon's very own College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, and Don Thorp, Production Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center, share their experiences with the F5100 in HPC environments.

And while the entire HPC community is focused on the upcoming SC09 conference right now, be sure to save the dates for the other major international supercomputer show, ISC10 starting May 31 in Hamburg Germany. Meanwhile, check out the following video by my favorite movie star, Sun EVP John Fowler, talking about the F5100.

Catch Scott and Larry in the opening keynote, Sunday at 5:45 pm PT on OpenWorld Live. But don't have too much fun tonight, get some rest and join Oracle's Judson Althoff Monday morning for a 5K partner run through the streets of San Francisco, meet Sun & other partners at 5th & Howard at 7 am.

The Gospel of Java according to James.

Oracle Press Release Oracle and Sun Are Faster Than IBM: Proof Now Available

Go to the OpenWorld Live site.

Traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) customers continue to rapidly adopt the latest 40 GB/sec QDR InfiniBand technology delivered by the Sun InfiniBand Switch 648. Recently, Oracle put their weight behind Sun's QDR technology in Exadata v2, incorporating the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 36.. Today, Sun further expands our family of high performance fabrics offering with the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72.

For the first time ever, the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 lets you aggregate up to 72 QDR 4x ports into a single 1RU switch and multiple switches can be combined to cost effectively link up to 576 servers. For larger clusters, the Sun InfiniBand Switch 648 supports up to 648 servers with a single switch, or up to 5184 servers in a full non-blocking fabric using eight 648 port switches.

This week's Forbes article titled, Supercomputing in the Enterprise talks about how non-HPC workloads including server virtualization and consolidation increasingly are adopting HPC technologies like high performance fabrics. While many HPC customers are using large high performance fabrics based on the Sun Datacenter Switch 648 to solve problems that simply couldn't be solved a few years ago, commercial customers increasingly need high performance fabrics just to keep up with advances in multi-core CPU technology.

Lets say that last year you purchased a Sun Blade x6250 server module with two dual-core x86 CPUs. That was a total of four processor core and might easily have required four GigE connections. While we sell a Quad GigE network card, fast forward to today and the same x6250 blade module is equipped with quad core CPUs or a total of eight processor cores. Assuming the same network bandwidth per core was required, that would be 8 GigE connections. Opt instead for the Sun Blade x6275 server module and you get 16 processor cores per server module. If you filled a rack with four Sun Blade 6000 chassis each filled with x6275 blades, and provided a GigE connection for each core, you would need an astounding 640 ethernet cables coming out of the back of the rack. It is no wonder why HPC and commercial customers alike are looking to high performance fabrics that offer cable aggregation and other benefits.

Of course, InfiniBand is not the only high performance fabric available. Sun sells a 10 GigE network card for our blades and also has a 10 Gig Virtual Network Express Module for the Sun Blade 6000.

So no matter if you are looking to build a high performance fabric out of InfiniBand or 10 GigE, Sun has products and solutions that can help you today.

Back from Cape Town, I wanted to finish up my discussion of CHPC with a few photos of their data center infrastructure. As I mentioned in my last post, CHPC uses the new Sun Constellation System Glacier cooling doors, the first such deployment in Africa we are aware of using energy efficient passive cooling doors. In my Jülich Underground post earlier this summer I shared some pictures of Jülich's underground cooling pipe installation. Cape Town being blessed with a more temperate climate than Jülich Germany, Sun's Data Center Strategy, Design, and Build Services team was able to help CHPC design a completely outdoor versus underground cooling infrastructure.

CHPC's data center integrates three high efficiency cooling units which operate in an N+1 redundant fashion. The center can operate on a single cooling tower during most operational conditions, with the second cooling unit providing additional capacity for maximum operations or hot summer days. Meanwhile, the third unit provides redundancy should either of the primary units fail.

While most of Jülich's plumbing and water pumps were under their data center, CHPC was able to locate their's outside next to the cooling units.

And finally, to close of my blog series on CHPC, a look at Cape Town's Table Mountain, one of the many reasons why locals call Cape Town the most beautiful city in the world.

If you haven't already signed up, take a few minutes today to register for Sun's HPC Virtual Conference being held next week. Andy Bechtolsheim and other Sun HPC experts will be joining me for this unique virtual conference dedicated to High Performance Computing to discuss the trends and issues facing the HPC community.

Compute to Compete was certainly the theme of the day as I joined Ms Naledi Pandor Minister of Science and Technology for South Africa at the launch of our latest Sun Constellation System and Africa's largest supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town.

Just a few short months ago, Sun launched the first of our second generation Sun Constellation System at the Jülich Supercomputer Center in Germany. Since then, similar Sun Constellation System supercomputers have been installed in North and South America, in Australia, and in Asia. Today's launch at CHPC brings Open Petascale Computing to a sixth continent, bringing state of the art supercomputing to Africa.

At each Sun Constellation System launch I attend, as I meet with government, education, and industry executives, I hear a common theme, the growing need to compute to compete. While we didn't compare notes prior to the launch, Minister Pandor used the phrase outcompute to outcompete in reference to her government's investment in CHPC as well as South Africa's ongoing competition with Australia to host the Square Kilometer Array project.

CHPC is quite proud of their green IT efforts, and like the Sun Constellation System I described in my blog Jülich Underground, CHPC uses Sun's Glacier passive water cooled doors to save 25% or more of the electricity normally used to cool a data center, a first as far as we know for any African data center. Ironically, CHPC is built on the site of an old ocean fish research lab, and several large walk-in freezers were removed in the renovation of the old lab into data center space. And while they won't freeze fish, the Sun Constellation System's Glacier doors are definitely more efficient in data center cooling than the old freezers. Of course, Sun Constellation System technology is not limited to HPC clusters and having read in the local paper this morning a report estimating South Africa would have to increase electrical generation capacity by 20 Gigawatts by 2020, I couldn't help but comment to Minister Pandor to think how that amount could be reduced if all data centers in South Africa used similar passive cooling technology.

Besides Green IT, another major thrust of CHPC is the use of open source software. Their new Sun Constellation System uses the Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition including the latest versions of Sun Grid Engine software and the Sun Lustre File System.

CHPC also followed the lead of other Sun HPC customers such as HPCVL in Canada and installed a Sun M9000 system, with 256 UltraSPARC CPU cores and 2 TB of memory which will be used to run large share memory codes for computational fluid dynamics research as well as other research requiring a large shared memory system. Running the open source Solaris operating system, the M9000 will provide users a similar HPC environment as the Sun Constellation System including Sun Grid Engine and NFS access to the Lustre file system.

Anyone who thinks Africa isn't ready for world class HPC had better think again!

Thanks to all of you who have inquired if I am being impacted by the terrible fires in the Los Angeles area that as of this afternoon have burned over 105,000 acres. Luckily, I live away from the fire area, but my condolences go out to all of those who have suffered losses. This NASA image from yesterday gives you some idea of the extent of the fire, although the Station Fire has more than doubled in size since that time!

If you want to learn more about how this image was collected and processed, visit the NASA's Earth Observatory site. For up to date information on the fire, I have been following the LA Times web site which is doing an excellent job in covering the blazes.

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.

Today, eSolar opens a new 5 MW Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant outside of Los Angeles.

(Credit eSolar)

For those who are not familiar with eSolar, it is a Bill Gross startup from Idealab and described more in today's Los Angeles Times article.

Knowing that I had a rare week with no travel, I decided last weekend to do a little father-son project and install my own small solar system, thinking at first it would be just the thing to run my teenage son's various portable devices and perhaps the small aquarium in his room. I had been eying the Sunforce 60-watt solar charging kit at Costco my last several visits and decided to take the plunge (Amazon.com carries the kit at a similar price, with free super-shipping and six months interest-free if you use your Amazon charge card, although that didn't work for my weekend impulse buy). The kit includes everything you need to for a small off-grid system except a battery, including all cables, a battery charge controller, and a 200 watt inverter. With the usual caveats, you should even be able to claim the 30% US tax credit for the kit.

So our Saturday started with assembling the PVC frame for the 4 solar panels in our garage. Unfortunately, the factory sealed box was missing one of the PVC pieces needed to complete the frame and I had visions of the rest of the day spent in Costco's return line trying to get an exchange. Luckily, when I returned around noon, a Costco manager was able to promptly help me and took the missing piece out of another box and I was on my way in less than five minute, now that was a pleasant surprise! On my way out, I stopped by Costco's automotive center (separate entrance, separate cashier, no waiting) and purchased a deep-cycle marine battery.

The 200 watt inverter is plenty to run my laptop, cell phone charger, and the small aquarium pump. With no travel and no in-office meetings, I have not had to use my car for work this week, further lessening my carbon footprint. My only complaint is that the 200 watt inverter has a small noise fan that runs continuously when turned on so next weekend's project is to replace it with a larger, 1500 watt inverter that has thermostatically controlled fan.

Knowing just enough about data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to sound impressive at cocktail parties, I realized running the AC inverter only to then have my laptop power adapter convert back to DC was not efficient, so as my Mac laptop battery approaches a full charge, I've been unplugging the inverter and plugging my laptop DC adapter directly into the battery power cable, which avoids an energy-burning DC-AC-DC cycle. The one lonely fish that has survived my son's mostly failed attempts at fish care over the last year doesn't mind that its water is only filtered part of the day!

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.