Friday October 06, 2006

CEC 2006... Luckily I got chance to attend CEC 2006 which was organized at San Francisco from 1st Oct to 4th Oct. However this time as a attendee. Interestingly we had a demo on Solaris 10 adoption, Sun Cluster 3.2 and ZFS which was very well received.

- Day one :- I attend a very good talk on 'Successes in High Performance Computing (HPC): Details of how Sun was successful at Tokyo Tech and others. Sun in the HPC space - New Systems, New Entry Points, New Margins' by Dean Russell and John Fragalla. This was very information and it gave me information on how complex the infrastructure could be to setup. Titech (Tokyo Institute of technology) used 600+ Galaxy 4 machines to build this super-computer. It was done by Sun CRS team.

I also attended 'Advanced techniques in the modern microprocessor design' which was okay.

The talk on 'Sun's New x64 Data Server' by Trungchau Ngo was on Thumper architecture (x4500 machines) and it was a good information for me. It demonstrated how cheap disk (250 GB SATA disks) could be used, combined with ZFS for RAID, to get maximum performance at less price.

The last talk that I attended on day one was 'Introduction to Logical Domains (LDOMs)' and it was also good. Sun has sun4v architecture.

These topics were interesting to me as I think there is lot of potential in Storage and Virtualization.

- Day two: I could not much talk. I attended 'Demo LDOMs on Niagara' which was good. I also attended a talk on VMware and Xen which was very informative. Parallels have something similar were MacOS runs as main OS and Solaris as guest OS.

- Day three: I attended Bryan Cantrill's talk on Dtrace. Unfortunately I was working on a hot issue which required an immediate update.

During these three days, I also got chance to see the city and it's pretty good. You can find some photographs here.

On Sunday, Chandan and myself biked 9-10 miles from hotel to Sausalito town which is a historic place. (2006-10-06 09:51:58.0) Permalink