Monday May 05, 2008

I'm a bit late posting this, but did want to mention that the Peach open movie project recently released Big Buck Bunny, a 3D animated movie that was rendered on the Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com. Details on the operation of the Peach render farm are here. You can also click on the diagram below for a closer look at the overall IT setup for the project.

Today Sun announced the availability of our first OpenSolaris binary distro, OpenSolaris 2008.05, which is built from the OpenSolaris Project's open-source code base. You can download the LiveCD bits and read more at http://www.opensolaris.com. With LiveCD you can boot the distro without writing anything to disk and decide later whether you want to install it or not.

I've filed this under my HPC category. Why? Because future versions of this distro will form the substrate on which we intend to build a full HPC distro that will include both the OS and layered products and will address both application development and deployment. Components will include compilers, MPI library, developer tools, distributed resource management, as well as provisioning, management, and monitoring capabilities.

The definition and creation of this HPC distro will be run as an OpenSolaris project, which we will be starting in earnest soon. We invite any interested party to join the HPC Developer Community to get involved.