I have always thought of Switzerland as a country where nothing happens - there never seems to be news about the country or its people. It is usually organizations like CERN or the various United Nations agencies who make the headlines, or the inordinate number of Swiss Nobel Prize Winners. The only Swiss that feature regularly in the Indian media are banks, watches and chocolate.

The sentiment is vaguely echoed in (the not entirely accurate) Orson Welles' monologue in The Third Man :

"You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The Ig Nobel Awards are always good for a chuckle, which is what they are awarded for : achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The 2008 awardees lived up to the billing; did you know that

• dog fleas can jump higher than cat fleas?
• armadillos modify history by interfering with archaeology?
• if you are peddling placebos, you should price them higher?
• the lowly slime mold can solve puzzles?
• a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings?
• Coca Cola is an effective spermicide?
• Coca Cola is not a spermicide?

To get back to the subject though, the Peace Prize went to The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the Swiss for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. Browsing through the ECNH website is revealing : The Swiss Constitution apparently enshrines the concept of the Dignity of Living Beings, and the ECNH translates this concept into concrete terms. For example, the report that earned the award concluded that

• an arbitrary harm caused to plants is morally impermissible
• the instrumentalisation of plants (their use for the benefit of human beings) requires moral justification
• plants are excluded for moral reasons from absolute ownership (majority opinion)
• genetic modification of plants should involve conservation of natural relationships (majority opinion)

The very notion of ethical considerations around animals and plants is (pleasantly) surprising to me. Quite a few people on the planet still have trouble applying ethics to human beings.

Tags : Ig Nobel Switzerland Ethics

High wire acrobats frequently walk the wire without a net, but chips seem set to trump them by communicating without wires. Proximity Communication continues to feature regularly in the news as it matures. The Sun Web feature Contrarian Minds describes Jack Cunningham's work this month. Cunningham leads the team working on an advanced packaging solution for the technology, focusing on placement accuracy and power supplies.

Alignment of chips is vital to Proximity Communication - if the transmitters on one chip do not align perfectly with the receivers on the other, the coupling might not be strong enough for communication to take place. Jack and Ashok Krishnamoorthy have come up with a technique involving pits on one chip and what they call microspheres on the other. Bring them to within 200 microns of each other, let the chip with the pits go, and voilà, it rolls into perfect alignment with the other chip. A pit and ball approach, if you will.

The article also describes Cunningham's work in the design of how the chips receive all the power they require.

Some of Krishnamoorthy's other research is described in a June 2008 Contrarian Minds article - using light to communicate between chips turns out to be a pretty smart idea. Such research resulted in a DARPA contract for the Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication project, and The Register reported recently on the work that Sun will be doing along with Kotura Inc for the project.

A September 2005 Computerworld article went over some of the history of Proximity Communication research at Sun.

Tags : Proximity Communication Chip Interconnect

InfoWorld honours extra-ordinary technology leadership by releasing their list of Top 25 CTOs of the year. This year's list includes Greg Papadopolous, CTO of Sun Microsystems Inc. Congratulations!

The article accompanying the citation mentions a slew of innovations emerging out of Sun's Engineering - Project Blackbox, Systems based on Chip Multi-Threading, memory and networking subsystem advances and OpenSolaris.

Tags : CTO InfoWorld Sun

Greenplum and Sun Microsystems Inc announced yesterday that Reliance Communications Limited has deployed the Datawarehouse Appliance powered by Sun and Greenplum to support applications ranging from legal and regulatory compliance to call detail record analysis.

The press release went on to describe the impact of the deployment :

.. The time required to turn around an ad hoc request for detailed call records from the historical call detail record (CDR) database shrank by over 80 percent in most cases, from five hours to less than an hour, and ... the average time to load a day’s worth of data [reduced] by over 80 percent, from two hours to under twenty minutes.

The Datawarehouse Appliance combines the parallelized shared-nothing Greenplum Database with the innovative Sun Fire X4500 Data Server, Solaris 10 and ZFS technologies to deliver scalable data capacity and query throughput, and attractive price/performance.

The Appliance configurations include a Master/Query Dispatch Server hosting the Greenplum Database master segment instance to provide user connection services and query optimization/dispatch. The data segments are distributed across a bank of Data/Execution Servers. The tightly integrated storage and compute elements in the SF X4500s are particularly well suited to datawarehousing environments.

Tags : BIDW Datawarehouse Greenplum India

The Austin American-Statesman features the Ranger in an article describing how Austin has begun claiming a bigger piece of the supercomputing action. The Ranger is the most powerful general purpose supercomputer in the world, funded by the U.S. Government's National Science Foundation, and developed by Sun in conjunction with the Texas Advanced Computer Center.

TACC, Sun and AMD collaborated with the Austin Institute for Computational Engineering and Science, Arizona State University and Cornell University in the application development, deployment, management and training strategies around the infrastructure.

At the heart of Ranger is the Sun Constellation System - a combination of ground-breaking compute, storage and networking components from Sun. The American-Statesman article is accompanied by an interactive graphic illustrating how you get from the AMD Barcelona processor to a 3936 node cluster. Peaking at 504 TeraFLOPS, Ranger is a huge step in the drive toward Petascale Computing.

Tags : HPC Petascale TACC

Sun Microsystems is one of 74 brands (chosen from 987 entries across 129 categories) declared Business Superbrands in 2008 by Superbrands India. This achievement underscores the reputation we are honoured to have across the Enterprise and Developer communities in the country.

Way to go, Sun India!

Tags : Superbrands Sun India

Steve Staso sent out an e-mail that alerted me to the latest addition to the Sun.COM domain - Channel Sun : infrastructure that allows Sun employees to post videos on-line. The first videos are already up - quite a few interesting interviews conducted by Sumaya Kazi at JavaOne, and a useful Video Tips and Tricks show by Steve Ewertz.

Channel Sun joins blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the various communities that Sun employees participate in and contribute to. I also bump into colleagues (and the content they generate) on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed ... Did I say colleagues? I might never have met quite a few of them, but they are friends now.

As for Channel Sun, Lights, Camera, Action!

Tags : JavaOne Sun UGC Technology

I am not much of a basketball fan, so apologies for a misleading post title (attributable to the partial attention I paid to ESPN India's telecast of a Maryland-Duke game). I managed to install the Indiana Developer Preview 2 OpenSolaris distribution on my TigerMacOS X 10.4 laptop using VirtualBox yesterday.

A 20MB distribution that allows me to run Indiana DP2 on top of MacOS X sounded too good to be true. Thanks to simple VirtualBox configuration and Alan Burlison's advice on guest OS networking, obtaining a connected Indiana VM on my Macbook Pro was a breeze. Entertainment by the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens during configuration possibly helped too.

I used the PCN driver from the Solaris Express Community Edition for networking as Alan suggested, but his post also contains instructions around (and an ISO image of) Masayuki-san's free NIC drivers for Solaris. I set 1GB of base memory and 32MB of virtual memory for my virtual machine.

The idea of a layer managing and provisioning resources for applications and abstracting those resources from the environments in which the applications run is not new, of course. However, virtualization seems to have come into its own lately. The innotek acquisition is the most recent milestone in the history of our virtualization portfolio - a history that has looked very busy in the last decade or so with my favourite highlights being Dynamic System Domains (a capability that has evolved several generations since the E10K days), Solaris Containers, Sun Ray thin clients, Chip Multi-threading, Secure Global Desktop, Logical Domains, ZFS, the Storagetek acquisition, Project Blackbox and Sun xVM.

There is no particular need for the screenshot that occupies much of the real estate here, but it saves you a thousand words.

Tags : virtualbox macos opensolaris

My colleague and friend, Saday Tiwari presented at the Customer Engineering Conference along with Olaf Schnapauff on the technology and success factors in India versus other more established geographies in the mobile telephony space.

They discussed how the mobile phone transforms the lives of millions of Indians. An example they cited was that of a fisherman returning from the high seas with his catch. Traditionally, the fisherman was locked in to the port he set out from, almost always selling at a price well short of what he could potentially obtain. With mobile phones becoming affordable and ubiquitous and Service Providers offering widespread coverage, the fisherman can now, even as he returns from his fishing trip, discover where he can command the best price in the vicinity. The Network is making the difference to humanity Sun Microsystems and other organizations are hoping to achieve.

Mobile Telephony Subscription Growth	Organized Retail Growth

Infrastructure in India is growing at a pace that seems at once astounding and inadequate. The mobile services market is a great example. In March 2002, 45 million Indians owned a phone (wireline or wireless), approximately 6.5 million of whom were wireless subscribers. Five years later, wireline subscription is stagnant but wireless subscription reached 168. Nearly a quadrupling in 5 years. Over March 2006 - March 2007, monthly growth was at the rate of 6.5 million subscribers. If anything, the growth has been accelerating (to 8 million additions a month now) and we reached 200 million wireless subscribers in August. The one statistic that we cavil at is that of teledensity - with a population of over 1.1 Billion in the country, we still have a long way to go.

Such growth figures are evident in other sectors too. For example, the organized retail sector amounted to 4 Billion USD in 2005 and is projected to grow to 64 Billion USD market in 2015 (projections vary, but this number is at the lower end of the band).

The technology challenges that service providers in various sectors face are similar : they are worried primarily about the ability of their IT infrastructure to scale to unprecedented levels. They need technology to handle unpredictable load characteristics. Deployments have to be highly efficient in their resource utilization. Technology should lend itself to reduce the time it takes for a business idea to be rolled out into a product - the first mover advantage in general is enormous. These are precisely what we believe characterize Redshifted application workloads. Workloads (and infrastructure supporting them) that in our estimate will dictate the demand for computing in the future.

This is why I characterize India as a redshifting nation - the entire infrastructure (telecom, financial services, retail, hospitality, travel ...) is growing at an astonishing clip. Moore's Law implies that the performance that can be extracted out of the real estate on a chip can double every two years or so. Saturated application areas can therefore be well served by computers, as the rate of growth of their workloads will not be as fast. Indian IT infrastructure however is under-served by Moore's Law, thus fueling demand for more and more system capacity.

Sun's research and development strategy recognizes this trend (see Greg Papadopolous' presentation at our Analyst Summit earlier this year), and our technologies are being shaped by the need for massive scale systems tailored to deliver agility, efficiency and a competitive edge to our customers.

[Note : Added some hyper-links and explanations to the original post]

Tags : suncec2007 India

Innovations in Sun's chips, interconnects, operating system and data management products are emphasizing the fact that Sun is a Systems company, and not just a hardware company, or a software or a storage one. At the Customer Engineering Conference this year, the buzz is around products that combine these components into a system more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Sun Microsystems spends approximately two billion dollars annually on Research and Development. Over the past couple of days at CEC, several sessions have focused on the outcome of this investment into innovation. I put together a list of products and solutions unveiled over the last couple of years or are being worked on as we speak.

These are just names that I can remember, and given the inefficient RAM technology that my brain was shipped with, I am sure to have left out a few. The line-up is awe-inspiring, and the next 18 months are actually going to see an acceleration in the introduction of game-changing offerings.

Systems and Components	Software	Storage	Development/Deployment Models and Services
UltraSPARC T1 and T2	Solaris Containers	Project Fishworks	Open Source
Sun Fire X4600 and X4450	DTrace	Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper)	Java Enterprise System
Scout Threading	ZFS File System	Sun Storagetek 5800 (Honeycomb)	Solaris Express
Transactional Memory	Predictive Self Healing	StorageTek T10000	Sun Connection
Proximity Communication	Solaris Trusted Extensions
Project Neptune	Project Crossbow
Magnum Infiniband Switch	Sun xVM Virtualization Platform
Sun Streaming System	Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Sun Constellation System	JavaFX
Blackbox	Project Darkstar

Another thing that strikes one is the dilemma of which column to assign a technology to. The distinctions between server, storage, networking and software is blurring to a point where we can introduce terms like chipvers, storvers and servage, as one of our keynote speakers Jim Baty pointed out more than a year ago.

Tags : suncec2007

Four thousand Sun engineers invaded the Paris and Bally's Hotels in Las Vegas earlier this week. Engineers usually act on the basis of logical deduction, a faculty that has seemingly limited application on the Las Vegas Strip. However, our collective presence (for the annual Sun Customer Engineering Conference) has not influenced the rampant speculation in the casinos one whit.

The northernmost hotel on the Las Vegas Strip is the Stratosphere. After a couple of days at the general sessions, breakout sessions and the UltraSPARC T2 based systems launch, i feel like I have been launched into the stratosphere. The heady feeling that one gets when surrounded by fellow professionals from around the world is something that will last for a while, I suspect.

The theme of the conference is Shift : Our Universe, Our World, Your Move. A key trend influencing Sun's technology directions is what we believe to be an imminent shift in the applications that will fuel demand for compute infrastructure. Application areas that our customers regard as their competitive weapons and that will scale massively will outstrip workloads that are cost centres for customers, in their demand for systems, storage, software and associated services. We call such application areas Redshift applications.

Another shift that our world is experiencing, and IT deployments particularly so, is the shift to green - ecologically responsible ways of working and living make economic sense as well as ease the strain on finite natural resources.

These are the shifts that our conference dwells on, and every one of us will be pondering what move (s)he needs to make to tailor our solutions and technologies to a Redshifted, Greener world.

Tags : suncec2007

Computer Sweden reports that user names and passwords for over a hundred accounts at government organizations worldwide have been posted on the Internet. The organizations include Indian ones too.

The breach is troubling in itself, but a casual persual of the passwords used by some of the Indian embassies and institutes will leave one gasping :

Enough said.

Tags : India Security

An article in ZDNet remarks on what the common citizen should really worry about in the wake of the ISO OOXML voting controversy.

Whether or not OOXML is a good candidate for an open standard is beside the point: there is prima facie evidence of voting in bad faith, without proper consideration of all the aspects of the proposal. This is not something that can be fixed later; there are severe implications for the industry in adopting a standard that has not been fully analysed. Those who vote without understanding what they vote for, or because they have primarily political or commercial reasons, are guilty of subverting the process.

I suspect everyone understands precisely what they are voting for. Atleast some of the reasons have nothing to do with the merits (or demerits) of the proposed specification, and there's the rub.

The questions of how a national committee, deciding on a vote in any standardization process, is constituted and who participates in the deliberations should be considered by the ISO. For ISO standards to continue to be treated with universal acceptance, it should take cognizance of what goes on in the standardization process outside its halls.

The Hungarian Standards Institution has been asked by a minister to reconsider its approval. Sweden has decided to abstain from the OOXML vote, reversing the earlier approval due to a technicality. I came across a blog post by Wictor Wilén on the original Yes vote :

When this day approached both camps, the pro Office Open XML team and the no-sayers both gathered their forces for the final battle. We all entered the meeting at the last possible minute and we all was signed in to the meeting.

Sounds less like a specification meet and more like a medieval gathering of Vikings. Sam Hiser writes that the French meeting degenerated into what sounds like a slanging match. The Inquirer covers more, to coin a phrase, un-standards-like behaviour.

Jason Matusow writes on his blog :

If Open XML is to be approved for standardization at JTC1, it needs to do so by the book... it is critical that these activities remain within the realm of ethical behavior as well as behavior defined by the rules for the JTC1 process.

The stuffing of voting bodies, amazingly enough, seems to be within the rules - ISO addresses the question of who represents a country, but is vague on how national voting committees are constituted. This should be corrected. However with all due respect to Jason, it seems to me that the realm of ethical behaviour is being gerrymandered. The ISO Code of Ethics states, amongst other things,

ISO members are committed to developing globally relevant International Standards by :

ensuring fair and responsive application of the principles of due process, transparency, openness, impartiality and voluntary nature of standardization

There are atleast three principles in there that have been violated in several countries, if reports are to be believed. A case has also been made for involuntary canvassing in the Inquirer article. It is only because the Internet has ensured openness that the allegations are receiving publicity.

Unfortunately, actions coming under scrutiny are those seeking to get the standard approved. OOXML supporters seem to be ignoring the fact that a "No with comments" vote will be converted into a Yes during the Ballot Resolution Meeting if objections are addressed. When the comments are distributed after September 2, ECMA has until February 2008 to either refute them or change the specification to nullify them.

Jason also writes in an earlier post that all comments (including those prefaced with a Yes) will be considered by ECMA. Apparently this kind of reasoning has also prompted some countries to vote Yes and append technical comments. The logic escapes me : There has to be an incentive for the proposer to respond adequately to comments. The incentive is converting a No into a Yes.

When a voter has already voted Yes, the voter gives up the right to satisfaction. All comments could potentially be addressed by calling them invalid, for example. I might be doing ECMA an injustice by exaggerating, but the possibility exists.

There is also the chance that a vote can be changed from a Yes to a No, but if the original Yes vote is tainted, what odds would a gambler give on a change happening? Brings me back to the original question of the process.

I live in a country where subverting processes is done more often than one cares to remark on. Most of us avoid a code violation ticket by speculating with the constable on what miracle pays for his tea. An ISO process is held to higher standards, I hope.

Tags : OOXML ISO Standards

The weekend has been exhilarating. Ferrari took their second 1-2 finish this year at the Turkish Grand Prix, keeping the driver and constructor championships alive. Raikonnen had won the French GP and Massa had come in second, and they exchanged positions (no, not under team orders) for the Istanbul result. The German and Hungarian races had been disappointments, and it was a relief to see the prancing horses take maximum points last evening.

Ferrari and McLaren now have 6 wins each from the 12 races, but the other statistics reveal why the former is still 26 points behind : 4 second places to McLaren's 7 and 4 DNFs to McLaren's 1. Hamilton has been the find of the season, and Alonso is the only driver to score points in every race. Here is hoping Monza sees another Ferrari 1-2.

If Ferrari has been inconsistent, Manchester United's form has been dismal at the start of the English Premier League season : 2 draws and a loss in the first 3 matches, 1 goal scored, Rooney injured, Ronaldo suspended. Sunday's game against Tottenham Hotspur did not do much to restore confidence, but the scorcher of a goal from Nani and some luck meant that the team got its first win. I cannot type much more because I am too busy knocking on wood.

Tags : Ferrari F1 Man United EPL

It is a classic contrarian approach : the best way to allow a chip to communicate with another might be to remove the wires that connect them. Chips today communicate with other chips through wires that are generally welded to the chip through a process called Ball Bonding. There are several challenges with this, and the situation gets exacerbated by the kind of performance and compute density improvements happening within the chip.

Chip to Chip communication is far slower than that within a chip (primarily because the width of, and spacing between, wires within the chip are a 100 times smaller than those of wires between chips. This obviously is a performance bottleneck. Besides, an elaborate process is required to wire a chip up, making it expensive.

Proximity Communication lines up a transmitter on one chip against a receiver on another chip, with the two chips positioned very close to each other. The two form a capacitor and a voltage driven through the transmitter will result in a corresponding charge on the receiver, thus achieving communication. The method has been shown to achieve an I/O pad density 60 times greater than that possible with Ball Bonding. It thus allows larger bandwidths for a given area on the chip.

Other advantageous side-effects follow too : the conventional wire communication needs signal amplification as the external wires are larger. The power consumed and heat dissipated also increases because of the energy needed. Proximity Communication obviates the need for high amplification, resulting in smaller transmit/receive circuits, and expensive cooling. As the chips are not wired up to each other, the technique also permits chips to be easily replaced. One of the first patents in the area was awarded to Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Sun Fellow and Vice President. The idea was the overall Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards in 2004.

The technology caused a stir at the Sun Labs Open House in April 2007. Dr. Hans Eberle is working on Project Sedna, a next generation datacenter switch which employs Proximity Communication.

Key to the practical deployment of proximity communication is solving the problem of rotational and translational mis-alignment : if the transmitters on one chip do not align perfectly with the receivers on the other, the coupling might not be strong enough for communication to take place. To deal with this, Greg Papadopoulos and Robert Bosnyak developed Electronic Alignment, a technique that compensates for mis-alignment by allowing transmit/receive pad positions to move correspondingly. Dr. Drost credits this technique as vital to making the technology practical.

An amusing sidelight is provided by the title of the illustration in The Register's Proximity Communication article : Chip Fornication. Considering that the chips are not in contact with each other, El Reg must have meant Coupling 2.0.

Tags : Proximity Communication Chip Interconnect