e martë nëntor 30, 2004

Grids Redux

One of my first posts was a plea to sign up for the United Devices Grid to participate in cancer research in cooperation with the University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.

Now the Human Proteome Folding Project has begun. I have noticed my computers participating in this project recently. CNN reported on this project here. You can download the software here and join the SunOne team to show your support. While you are typing or out for coffee or away from your computer, it will be doing its part to cure cancer or fold proteins, participating with more than 1 million other computers in these projects.

Remember, Sun's illustrious leader is positively mental over grids also.
(2004-11-30 20:43:08.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Sarah McLachlan Redux

Back in October I mentioned that I liked World on Fire. As I mentioned before, I love this video because during it, Sarah says that a typical music video costs $150,000 but she made this one for $15. Then she she describes all the charity projects she sent the $150,000 to rather than pay LA studio costs. (One snide comment is that we may have to take up a collection for all LA production staff that did not get paid) Again I want to warn you before you watch the video at this link or at Itunes for a larger version, have a Kleenex ready. I still sniffle when I watch it.

I also added Blogoslovi to my Blog Roll because he gave the Afterglow album 4 stars. He is also concerned about cultural and spiritual issues.
(2004-11-30 19:43:30.0) Permalink Comments [6]

e hënë nëntor 22, 2004

Immersion Week

Here's part of the gang that got together at the Q center outside of Chicago last week for Sun's Immersion Week. This fine group is part of the Central US Data Center Practice that got together for a 'Birds of a Feather' meeting Thursday night. Standing on the left is Bill Pilarski, our fearless Practice Manager, and standing on the right side is Brian Ahearn, our Director. Squatting 2nd from the right is Phil Morris, our CTO. We got together to learn about Sun's new technology and strategy for the next year. As usual for this type of gathering, the classes contained important material but some presenters could have had better skills. The Solaris 10 Dtrace sessions and Zones sessions were good but I was in too few of them. Famous Sun Bloggers who I know were there include John Clingan, Glenn Brunette, John Beck, and Bart Smaalders. If I missed any other famous bloggers who attended, I apologize.
(2004-11-22 10:30:37.0) Permalink Comments [1]

e diel nëntor 21, 2004

The Machinist...Descent into madness

This weekend's cinematic choice was Christian Bale and Jennifer Jason Leigh in "The Machinist," a haunting movie about an insomniac who is losing it. As a matter of fact, you name it and he is losing it. He is losing weight and is down to 121 pounds, losing sleep and tends to nod off frequently, losing friends because he is acting peculiarly and perhaps losing his mind. It is suspenseful, shot in sepia tones with very little color and has a nightmarish quality. I liked it but it is definitely not for everybody, especially those who are squeamish. In Dallas it is only at the art house theater. A summary of reviews is found at Rotten Tomatoes my favorite movie review site.
(2004-11-21 19:30:41.0) Permalink

e premte nëntor 12, 2004

FireEngine aka Solaris 10 Network Stack

How did they get this past the lawyers??? They are actually saying that the new network stack is up to 45% faster. For a performance guy, this announcement is truly amazing. This article also discusses the coming 10 Gigabit networking. You can download the latest version of Solaris 10 x86 from here and take this screaming network stack out for a spin. Run your own speed comparisions against Linux, Windows, or whatever. (Disclaimer, your results may vary. Please do not use ftp as a networking benchmark, it sucks. Use the ttcp utility.)
(2004-11-12 13:21:32.0) Permalink

e enjte nëntor 11, 2004

Ray Charles

Last weekend's cinematic expedition was to Ray which truly was an acting tour de force. Everyone turned in an amazing performance and there should be several Oscar nominations and statues won for this movie. I began listening to pop music in junior high school and Ray Charles was often on the charts. Ray was a troubled performer who struggled with his addiction to heroin. This behind the scenes film looks unflinchingly at some of the ugly parts of the music industry and Ray's own life. He and one of his bandmates successfully overcame their addictions. Highly recommended.
(2004-11-11 09:05:35.0) Permalink

e mërkurë nëntor 10, 2004

Good News - Niagara in the public eye

Yesterday's news was depressing, but The Inquirer has this article, Sun's Niagara Falls Neatly into Multithreaded Place, discussing our 8 CPU core massively multithreaded processor code named Niagara. The diagram below attempts to illustrate the text of the article which says in part, "On a macro level, it will have eight cores, each core capable of running 4 threads in parallel, for 32 concurrently running threads." Naturally the illustration is chopped off at 4 cores, but its for illustrative purposes only. The C's in the diagram are compute time for the thread and the M's are the memory latency of the thread. By switching between threads on a core, we hope to minimize the time waiting for memory to catch up.
As a performance guy, this is exciting news. I can't wait to run cpustat and busstat on one of these processors.


(2004-11-10 15:19:46.0) Permalink

e martë nëntor 09, 2004

Ouch...Bad News if its True

The front page of the Wall Street Journal was depressing today with a lead article entitled Drag on High-Tech Recovery: Companies Do More with Less (Free this week only.) A few relevant quotes (read 'em and weep with me):

"Corporate spending on technology gear grew roughly 15% in the first half of the year...but...the recovery already is losing steam. The growth in corporate technology spending slowed to 9% in the third quarter.
The shift has big implications for the broader economy. It's terrific news for corporate buyers but is holding back a major driver of overall economic growth...Productivity, driven in part by technology, has risen for 14 straight quarters, the longest stretch in 60 years, though it too is showing signs of slowing."
"Forrester Research, which focuses on technology, says buyers are in a long period of 'digestion' that will extend until 2008. Corporate technology spending will grow only about 6% a year between now and then, Forrester says, as businesses figure out how to extract value from their purchases of the 1990s."

And this really hurts:
"Instead, tech buyers are most excited about new offerings that help them cut costs. Computer servers from Dell replace far more expensive models from vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc. The free Linux operating system reduces software costs. Other emerging open-source programs -- which generally are available free of charge and are easily modified by users -- threaten traditional business-software packages from suppliers such as Oracle Corp. Internet telephone systems slash communications costs. Indian programmers reduce the cost of writing custom programs."

I see all sorts of problems with these assertions. If the period of 'digestion' runs until 2008, companies would be running on servers that are 10 years old or at least 3 generations out of date. At a certain point, the Mean Time To Failure of 10 year old electronic components rises to the level at which the servers must be replaced on economic/availability/supportability grounds. Not to mention that the increasing sophistication of applications tends to require later generations of hardware just to keep up with the complexity. (2004-11-09 20:19:06.0) Permalink