planets.sun.com is currently in beta, but it is alive and working. It's a configurable feed aggregator that is available to Sun employees to use to create specialized "planets" of feeds.

I just created one for High Performance Computing at planets.sun.com/HPC.  It collects the feeds from blogs.sun.com that are marked with category HPC. It also subscribes to a set of Sun user forums on forums.sun.com, and the news feed from the HPC portal, hpc.sun.com

I don't know if this is at all useful. It could be. But it is clear that the amount of information related to high performance computing on the web is overwhelming.

Let me know if you find this useful. I will be expanding it to include feeds outside sun.com and with a wider set of categories.

But remember: Aggregate, don't aggravate.

John Markoff has an article in today's New York Times about some new techology coming out of Sun Labs that uses lasers to connect chips rather than wires.

"Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields."

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What if a group of playwrights used  infinitesmal calculus as a topic for writing plays?

See here:

  A SPECIAL EVENT:

                   MSRI at Monday Night PlayGround!

                6 short new plays inspired by the topic:

                  The Ghosts of Departed Quantities
                  (or, Is the Right Answer Enough?)

                     Berkeley Repertory Theatre
                        2025 Addison Street

                     Monday, February 18, 2008

                             8:00 PM

           (but, don't miss the pre-show discussion at 7PM)

              http://www.playground-sf.org/monday.shtml


    Monday Night PlayGround (now in its 14th season) is a
presentation of 6 short plays written on a common theme.  This coming
Monday, the theme will be a mathematical one:  "The Ghosts of
Departed Quantities (or, Is the Right Answer Enough?)".
      On February 6, a group of mathematicians at MSRI met with
the PlayGround pool of playwrights to try to describe the idea of
infinitesimals, how and why they appeared in calculus, and what the
reaction was, including Bishop Berkeley's famous mocking description
of them as 'ghosts of departed quantities'.  The playwrights engaged
the mathematicians in a discussion of the culture of mathematicians,
proofs, certainty, intuition, and a host of other aspects of the
story that naturally came up in the discussion.
      Then the playwrights went away to think about the dramatic
possibilities that the topic suggested.  They had 5-1/2 days to write a
short play inspired by the topic and 6 of the resulting plays will be
presented this Monday night at Monday Night PlayGround.
      It will be a very interesting evening, so we hope you'll
make plans to attend both the performances (which start at 8) and the
pre-show discussion (which starts at 7) with a panel drawn from the
mathematicians who presented the story and the playwrights who wrote
the plays.
      More information, including where (and how) to buy tickets,
can be found at www.playground-sf.org. 

The new HPC Community Portal (http://hpc.sun.com) is off to a great start with nearly 200 registered users. There's a lot going on with HPC at Sun these days, and the editors do their best to update the content there every day.

If you're a customer, partner, or Sun employee involved in HPC, we want to encourage you to contribute and share your experiences and perspectives here. Because this site is a WIKI, it is really easy to author content. To help you get started, we put together the "How to Engage" guide at: https://hpc.sun.com/page/aboutgetting-started

Phew! I almost rendered my laptop useless. But SXDE saved the day.

When I first set up the partitions on my laptop, I allocated 15GB for Windows C:\  and 15GB for Windows D:\  and the rest (90GB) for Solaris.  Well, it soon became clear that 15GB was not enough for the C:\  partition. I'd been meaning to combine C and D for some time now. Lately everything I ran on Windows got those Low On Disk Space messages. So my project for the weekend was to merge the two into a larger C:.

So, I booted up with my Knoppix live CD and used QTParted to repartition the C: partition to gobble up all of D:. That part seemed to work well. I recalled the last time I used QTParted it didn't mess with the data. And all looked fine, with the C:\ drive now 30GB with 14.5GB used.

That is, until I rebooted and discovered that QTParted had munged the Grub boot record. Now there was no way to boot Windows or SXDE. Grub just stared back at me not knowing what to do.

With knees shaking and a headache looming, I took a wild guess and figured that if I did another upgrade of SXDE, maybe the installer would recreate the Grub boot menu, restoring the pointers to the Solaris and Windows boot records. Well, it was worth a try. Anything else sounded horrible.

And it worked. I went thru the entire upgrade process again (oddly, the installer didn't ask why I was upgrading when the system appeared to be already up to date), and an hour or so later rebooted and there was the Grub menu looking as it should. Rebooting into Windows I found the C:\ drive with 30GB of space, 14.5 GB in use. It was all there, and it all worked.

Tragedy avoided. Time for a beer.

The SF Chronicle has a great article today about the Math Sciences Research Institute at UC Berkeley.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/25/BAPMUKT3I.DTL

MSRI (pronounced locally as Misry) has a wonderful public outreach program and they make many of their seminars and talks public.

The MSRI website is http://www.msri.org/

And there's one really special event happening this Saturday (I plan to attend):

There are a whole bunch of really interesting new music concerts coming up in the next couple of weeks here in the Bay Area:

Sat Jan 26: 4pm Pianist Christopher Taylor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
Simons Auditorium, Chern Hall, 17 Gauss Way (Grizzly Peak & Centennial, Berkeley)
Christopher Taylor talks with David Benson, author of Music: A Mathematical Offering and Robert Osserman, Special Projects Director, MSRI. Go to http://www.msri.org/ for information and directions. (More information).

Sat Jan 26: 8pm Helmut Lachenmann at Mills College Lisser Hall (Oakland)
William Winant, percussion; Graeme Jennings, violin; Erik Ulman, violin; Ellen Ruth Rose, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, cello; Matt Ingalls, clarinet; Geoffrey Gartner, cello; Christopher Jones, piano
http://music.mills.edu/events

Sun Jan 27: 3p Christopher Taylor plays Messaien's monumental "Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesu"
www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2007/20th_century_and_beyond/ct.php

Sun Jan 27: 3pm San Francisco Chamber Orchestra - Mountain is Mountain, a World Premiere of a Concertino for Flute & String Orchestra by award-winning composer Yu-Hui Chang.
First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley  www.sfchamberorchestra.org

Tu Jan 29: 8pm Del Sol Quartet - Coming Together
a collaboration with clarinetist Jeff Anderle and master didjeridu player Stephen Kent, featuring the quartet and the two guest musicians assembled into duet, quintet, and sextet, performing works by Derek Bermel, Peter Sculthorpe, Osvaldo Golijov, and a work by Arturo Salinas in which the musicians experiment as percussionists. These works reflect diverse influences, including American jazz, Asian folk melodies, Klezmer music, and Mexican rhythms. Berkeley Chamber Performances, 2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA http://www.delsolquartet.com/concert.html

Sat Feb 2: 8pm Sarah Cahill performs works by Terry Riley, Stephen Blumberg, Kyle Gann, and others. The new Arts Festival location is at 2213 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Details at www.berkeleyartsfestival.com.

Mon Feb 4: 8pm Luciano Chessa presents Chronicle Hotel
a recital that includes the premiere of his brand-new Chronicle Hotel and other compositions of his for piano and Vietnamese dan bau, as well as piano works by Giuseppe Chiari, Theresa Wong, Ramon Sender, Gregory Moore, Sylvano Bussotti, Mark Menzies, Benjamin Piekut, and others. San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Concert Hall, 50 Oak Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102-6011 http://www.sfcm.edu/calendar/calendar.aspx?performanceID=1926

Mon Feb 4: 8pm SF Contemporary Music Players - Yerba Buena Center Forum - S.F.
Music by Steve Mackey, Morton Feldman, David Sheinfeld, Jorge Liderman  http://sfcmp.org 

Sat Feb 9: 8p: Bang on a Can / Don Byron and Iva Bittova
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=3149

What?!  A Technical Article on docs.sun.com ?!

Yes!!

Getting Started with Sun Studio Software

This article is intended for developers and users new to Sun Studio software. It provides an introduction to Sun Studio software and its various features with links to the corresponding user guides and programming guides.

 Contents: