Nick's Noodlings: thoughts on ...

The newly announced UltraSPARC-T2 processor is choc-full of thread goodness, 64 of them in all. So what to do with this bounty? Run Logical Domains on them of course!

Here is screenshot displaying in xterms the primary domain console (lightgreen) and 63 guest domain consoles (orange) of 64 domains running on a single UltraSPARC-T2 processor.

There is also a flash demo made by Ash showing a single UltraSPARC-T2 starting and booting Solaris on 64 logical domains.

My name is Nicholas Nevin. I've come to the realisation that it's high time I jumped into the Blogosphere, so here goes.

I have been working at Sun for 10 years or so now. When I started, I worked in the High Performance Computing group on the Sun Message Passing Interface library. Many projects later I now find myself working on Logical Domains (LDoms) which is the virtualization technology for Sun's CoolThreads servers based on the UltraSPARC-T1 processor.

I work primarily on the Logical Domain Manager, a user-land software component which configures, controls and monitors the Logical Domains running on a server. On the odd occasion I also venture to do some work on LDoms related parts of the system firmware stack.

In this blog I hope to share my experiences with and thoughts on Sun's virtualization technologies, and on virtualization in general.

Bye for now, Nick.