The Official Site for Breaking News and the Latest Information from Sun On The Record

What: From Desktop to Datacenter Virtualization – a talk on datacenter efficiencies by Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, Sun Microsystems at the Silicon Valley Watcher's Online Virtualization Summit

When: November 4^th at 12 p.m. PT

Where: Live Webcast at
http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/search/Virtualization%20Summit/status/upcoming?page=1

Who: You

Steve Wilson will discuss datacenter efficiencies from desktop to datacenter virtualization, the momentum behind Sun’s xVM portfolio and customer stories, including ING-Diba.

This online summit will allow experts to share information on trends in virtualization, answer questions and offer strategies and tips to business professionals. Following the featured webcasts, Tom Foremski – a veteran tech journalist with Silicon Valley Watcher and former Financial Times correspondent - will moderate a roundtable discussion at 5 p.m. PT with the day's featured speakers to engage in a lively dialogue and answer additional questions from the audience.

You can find the full schedule here: http://www.brighttalk.com/channels/1258/view

Come join Sun and other virtualization experts!

The buzz at EDUCAUSE today was around Sun’s launch of two new social networks: Educonnection.org and OSUM (Open Source University Meetup). Both are designed to build strong communities that empower participants from the global education sector.

Educonnection.org offers an online platform for academia around the globe to exchange information and share best practices. Here is an interview with Joe Hartley, vice president of global government, education and healthcare, on Educonnection.org.

Sun's OSUM is an open social network created for students interested in sharing, using and learning about open source developer tools and platforms.  In the three weeks since its introduction, OSUM has already attracted over 10,000 student members from 50 countries, with more than 500 university clubs created! Here is an interview with Gary Serda on OSUM.

An important element of Sun's strategy is our increased focus on emerging markets.  To that end, we're honored and thrilled to announce that Sun was named Enterprise Vendor of the Year at the 4^th Annual ACN Arab Technology Awards, the most prestigious event dedicated to the region’s enterprise & IT industry. Judges review customer testimonials and proof of return on investment to identify the region's best and brightest enterprises and their use of information technology.  This award is wonderful validation of our focus on providing innovative solutions in emerging markets.  

To achieve this award Sun took the innovator’s path, building some of the region’s most ambitious projects including the Middle East’s first grid computing laboratory at UAE University. Sun also enabled firms to adopt new technologies like virtualization all while maintaining our commitment to open standards.

The judges said that Sun’s customer testimonials bore this philosophy out, while also noting that after sales support and service eclipsed expectations as well.

For more information on the ACN Arab Technology Awards and for details of all the winners visit www.itp.net/events/arabtechawards

For those of you who may have missed out on IDF last week, there was a significant amount of news generated by (or about) Sun. I've tried to include all the highlights below, but you can always go to www.sun.com/intel for more information.

Sun's compact Sun Fire X4450 server has been holding a World Record score of 464,355 SPECjbb2005 bops (58,044 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM) for all four-socket systems since May 2008. During Pat Gelsinger's keynote at IDF, Intel and Sun announced the SPECjbb2005 score of 531,669 bops (132,917 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM) on the Sun Fire X4450 server using the latest Intel Xeon processors. Fueled by the latest version 1.6.0_06 Performance Release of Sun's Java Platform, Standard Edition software, this is a new world-record score for all systems with four sockets and demonstrates an almost 15% improvement over the previous best score. The SPECjbb2005 benchmark emulates the design of real-world server-side Java applications and provides an accurate reflection of the business logic and objects, while stressing the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the scalability of the system's processors and memory.

In addition, Sun released a white paper discussing how the Solaris ecosystem and the new Intel Core Microarchitecture (formerly code-named Nehalem) for the Intel Xeon processor are optimized to work together to maximize performance, power efficiency, reliability and virtualization features.

Finally, Sun announced two new servers based on Intel Xeon processors -- the Sun Fire X2250 and Sun Fire X4250 servers. The Sun Fire X2250 server is an extremely fast 1U server for technical computing workloads, with three new record-breaking benchmarks to its name. The Sun Fire X4250 is the most expandable 2U enterprise-class system powered by Intel Xeon processors, with the highest disk count of any comparable server in the market -- 16 SAS disk drives. Check out these audio and video interviews to learn more about these new servers.

Benchmark footnote stuff: SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Claims are valid as of 8/20/2008, see www.spec.org for latest results. For comparison purposes, the terms CPU, chip and processor are used interchangeably. Each socket can accommodate one chip

With Joyent, we today announced free Web hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial developers. This is really a good deal as developers get immediate access to a powerful, world-class infrastructure based on Sun and Joyent technologies without having to spend any money until their applications gain momentum. Here is the press release. Here and here are more information on the program. In conjunction with this offer, we will embark on an eight-city tour (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston, New York and Austin/Dallas) in the U.S. to offer hands-on training to developers who want to write more effective applications that can scale to millions of users.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has taken the #1 position on the SPECompL2001 benchmark, adding to its list of top benchmarks and world records.

The SPECompL2001 benchmark is an industry-standard test based on 11 high-performance computing applications. It is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers and represents a collection of applications that are used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry, mechanical design, etc. and consists of medium and large problem sets.

On the large problem set, designed for measuring and comparing 8 through 128 processor systems, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server equipped with 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered a SPECompL2001 result of 1,456,653.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server result beat the IBM p 570 result by 38% and outperformed the SGI Altix 4700 system equipped with the same number of Itanium2 cores, by 45%.

For more information on the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, go to: www.sun.com/servers.

To learn more about this SPECompL2001 benchmark result and other records that have been set by the Sun SPARC Enterprise family, click here. 

SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 07/14/08. Sun results submitted to SPEC. Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (256 cores, 64 chips, 192/256 OMP threads, 2.52GHz) 1456653 SPECompL2001, 1250890 SPECompLbase2001. IBM POWER5+ p570 (64 cores, 32 chips, 128 OMP threads, 2.3GHz) 1056459 SPECompL2001. SGI Altix 4700 (256 cores, 128 chips, 256 OMP threads, 1.6GHz) 1005076 SPECompL2001.

Sun collaborated with Media Grid to launch the highly anticipated open source Education Grid in the Project Wonderland virtual world last week.

Educators, Media Grid, and ISIG members from the University of Essex, the University of Oregon, Saint Paul College, Common Need, the New Media Consortium and Sun Microsystems showcased their virtual environments in Project Wonderland. We reached our capacity in Second Life even before the start of the event!

Guests waiting for the opening ceremony to start.

Aaron Walsh of Media Grid and Kevin Roebuck of Sun hosted the opening ceremony at the Sun Pavilion in Second Life and invited guests to enter the various virtual schools in Wonderland.

Here is a press release we issued today.

The Top 500 Supercomputers list was announced this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany.

Sun took the #4 position with its deployment of the Sun Constellation System at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin.

Other key Sun highlights:

*Based on the Sun Constellation System, TACC's Ranger supercomputer is the highest ranking system built on an open architecture.

*Sun's Lustre File System manages 6 of the top 10 systems and nearly half of the top 50 systems.

*Nearly half of the top 50 systems are archiving data on Sun storage.

Check out Sun at ISC: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2008-0618/index.jsp. 

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has achieved a new single-system performance world record[1] on the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark at the 1 Terabyte scale factor, demonstrating the effectiveness of Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running Oracle 11g database on the SPARC-based platform.

Using the same number of cores, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperformed the best competing single system result, posted by the HP Integrity Superdome, by 69% with 18% advantage on price/performance.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 running the Solaris 10 OS maximizes utilization of your assets and is optimized for 24x7 mission critical computing. The system is ideal for large shared memory applications and business process computing such as BIDW and OLTP and provides for a long, highly scalable SPARC growth path.

To read all about this benchmark and to find out more information on the other world records broken by the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, go to: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/benchmarks.jsp

[1] As of May 14, 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (32 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads) 118,573 QphH@1000GB, $23.38/QphH@1000GB available 06/18/07. HP Integrity Superdome (32 processors, 64 cores and 64 threads) 69,999 QphH@1000GB, $28.69/QphH@1000GB available 06/18/07. Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), www.tpc.org <http://www.tpc.org/>

Sun has just released a new version of OpenSPARC T1, v1.6.  The release allows OpenSPARC T1 on FPGAs (field programmable gate array) to boot OpenSolaris. The result: an inexpensive development platform for hardware designers and developers to create hardware derivatives.

In December 2005, Sun first published the specifics for the UltraSPARC T1 processor, making it the first major processor design to be offered to the open source community. Over 7,000 copies of the OpenSPARC T1 processor RTL have been downloaded worldwide. Through the OpenSPARC technology program, Sun helps community members to build on proven technology at a dramatically low cost, and helps to drive down the cost of implementing designs into different technologies and products.

New Features in the Release 1.6 of  OpenSPARC T1

- T1 core supports single- and four-thread options on FPGAs
- Reference designs boot OpenSolaris on single- or four-thread mode
- Xilinx Virtex-5 technology support
- Networking (ftp, telnet) support

These new features are designed to enable a user to build real systems using the OpenSPARC T1 core.
For more details and to download the new release go here:  

Sun continues to shatter world records with its x64 servers! The Sun Fire X4450 server -- powered by four Quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 processors; the Solaris 10 OS; and the latest version of Sun's Java Platform, Standard Edition software -- delivered top-notch four-socket performance on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark. The 2U server, at least half the size of competitive servers, obtained a World Record score of 464,355 SPECjbb2005 bops (58,044 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM) for all four-socket systems.

 

For more info and competitive comparisons, check out the benchmark details.

In the last eight weeks, more than 14 patents have been issued to Sun Laboratories researchers.  Some of these are first-time recepients of patents, others have several under their belts.  Here are some highlights:

• Method and apparatus  for using memory compression to enhance error correction, Gregory M. Wright; Mario I. Wolczko
  
• Selecting  basis functions to form a regression model for cache performance, Ilya Gluhovsky;  David Vengerov; John R. Busch    
• Transparent switch using optical and electrical  proximity communication, John E. Cunningham; Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy; Ronald Ho; Robert J. Drost
• Floating point divider with embedded  status information, Guy L. Steele, Jr.  
• Blinded encryption and decryption, Radia J. Perlman 

Innovation is happening every day at Sun!

See Sun’s Center of Excellence (COE) program for the education community in action in this great video showing the construction of the COE at the Lurcerne University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. To learn more, I contacted the student host, Michael Thalman, for an interview. Responsible for system, network and SAN administration, he keeps the Enterprise Lab running.  

Rebecca: “What’s so special about this lab?”

Michael: “Opened in December 2006, the lab is a really flexible environment that lets us be as open as possible, involving students in lab administration and supporting their ideas as much as we can. From a technical point of view, we are using an advanced framework developed with a great deal of help from Sun Switzerland. It allows us to switch systems instantly: it’s somewhat similar to replacing hard drives to boot other systems, but it uses SAN virtualization technologies to manage this virtually without physically going into the lab.”

[Bruno, the other person in the video, is the Head of the Enterprise Lab and Michael's boss.]

Rebecca: “Bruno, how did this lab get started?”

Bruno: “I met Scott McNealy when I worked at the Sun Dublin office. After I returned to Switzerland and started my job as an assistant professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences, I was asked to build a curriculum for distributed enterprise application. For the hands-on part of the course, I had two choices: .Net or Java. This put me in mind of Scott so I sent him an email to ask for help. He responded within six hours—I couldn’t believe it! From there, we got into a discussion about the University’s needs and then agreed to cooperate to build a lab for education and research purposes.”

Here is a press release issued at the opening of the lab. The lab was described fittingly as “a playground where they [students] can work creatively and without stress.”

Here is a link to the lab’s website. And information on joining the COE program.

The Uptime Institute recognized Sun with a Green Enterprise IT Award for the our work on our energy-sipping Santa Clara datacenter, as outlined in the whitepaper - "Aligning Business Organizations: Sun's approach for building energy-efficient datacenters."

Dean Nelson, Sun senior director of global lab and datacenter design services, accepted the award
tonight and provided an overview of Sun's eco responsibility efforts to Ken Brill, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute, in a podcast you can find here.

The official award name is a bit of a tongue-twister - Best-in-Class Implementation Winner for the 2008 Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Awards in the category of Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment. Click here for full details on the awards.

In case you missed it, this week's eWeek Magazine features Sun on the cover.  A pic of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green. Inside is a Q&A with those two execs talking about Sun's emphasis on open source and how it is helping to revitalize the company.  Here's a portion:

"Open source is a means to an end. It's a mechanism to grow the broadest market, build the largest ecosystem, reach the maximum set of opportunities ... but just because you've reached the market doesn't mean you've effectively built the business. It's the difference between being popular and being successful."

--Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO 

To read the entire article click here.