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Wednesday November 11, 2009

Sun Studio OpenMP gets 12x improvement on Seismic benchmark on SLES10
This story is hard to pass up: Sun's BestPerf blog (read the details here) recently reported how they got a 12x performance improvement over a single-threaded version on an important Seismic (Reverse Time Migration) benchmark using Sun Studio's OpenMP feature on SLES10. Its a great story of how Sun can deliver performance through a combination of Sun Studio and new Hardware (via Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array). Yes, this is the same Flash Array that has been the talk of the town and has notched up several World Record wins.
Several points come to mind:

Sun Studio and OpenMP are key to exploiting parallel performance. Not just with Flash, but also with multiple cores now becoming the mainstay in chip offerings. Multi-threading, parallel performance (and parallel programming, for those who are willing to take the effort) is going to be even more critical to fully utilize system resources now and into the future.
Sun Studio performance here is highlighted on SuSE 10. Note this, because I've had to defended the impression that Sun Studio doesnt do as well on Linux; it does. Sun Studio does not leave any performance, features, tools, options, optimizations out of its offering on Linux.
The Flash Array Storage alone gets a 2.2x performance win over 15K disks. But the combination with Sun Studio in achieving parallelism that the Flash Array Storage can exploit is even more attractive.

Posted by tatkar ( Nov 11 2009, 09:37:38 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Tuesday November 10, 2009

Sun Studio extends Linux support to OEL
Sun Studio now runs on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This extends the Linux platforms supported to include RHEL 5, SuSE 10, CentOS 5, and now OEL. Sun Studio continues to be available FREE on Linux as well as Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms.
You can download it from the Sun Download center (here).
Posted by tatkar ( Nov 10 2009, 12:33:33 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Friday October 23, 2009

Oracle and Cloud Computing: bluster v offerings

We all know and have read that Oracle and particularly Larry and the Cloud Computing hype have been somewhat at odds. Some examples:

Undoubtedly there are several other assertions to this effect. Granted, Larry doesnt seem to like the term. And many of Cloud Computing's avid followers do admit that he has a point. Yes, googling for Ellison+Cloud+Computing yields millions of hits.

Does this mean Oracle refuses to do Cloud Computing? Not at all. Follow the money trail instead. Google for Oracle+Cloud+Computing and you can see a very different picture. I was impressed by the prominent presence of On-Demand versions of all Oracle products at the OOW DEMOgrounds. Virtually, all products (at least ones I know about) had On-Demand versions on display. And talking to various product managers reinforced this feeling. Oracle may be influenced by Larry's disdain for the Cloud Hype and Hyperbole, but it is run by how much money is on the table. As it should be. And in this regard, it has plenty to offer. Consider these broad references:

Oracle had a preso at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld where the presenters outlined Oracle's On-Demand portfolio, "including Oracle's cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and on-demand vision to outline how customers can use unparalleled flexibility to their advantage in the purchase, deployment, support, hosting, and managing of their Oracle solutions" (words from their abstract). It makes for an interesting reading (requires membership or fees to access). Moreover, Salesforce.com had a HUGE and prominent presence in Moscone West.

My conclusion: forget the hype and the bluster surrounding Larry and Cloud computing. Focus on where Oracle is delivering products, datacenter services and a very flexible set of offerings. My guess from reading Oracle's 10K is that it makes a ton of money (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) on it and expects this trend to grow. So, expect more from Oracle, not less, in this regard. The company knows there is plenty of money to be made by showing leadership in this domain and it isnt going to ignore such a juicy opportunity.

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 23 2009, 02:08:43 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Thursday October 22, 2009

Cloud Computing peaks in Gartner Hype Cycle Study
Gartner's 2009 Hype Cycle is shown here. Some interesting trends among the 1600+ technologies they examined:
Cloud computing and Ebooks lead the pack among "Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations"
Social software and Microblogging (Twitter, ...) have tipped over and are entering the trough of disillusionment
RFID and 3-D printing are on a track for being longer-term transformational technologies
Gartner Hype Cycle is explained here in greater detail.
If you dont want to buy the book, a simpler explanation is found in Wikipedia here.

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 22 2009, 05:05:28 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Wednesday October 21, 2009

Showcasing Sun Studio Blogging Contest winners
In June 2009, Sun Studio announced a blogging contest that ran until September.
The winners of that contest are now being showcased on the Sun Studio landing page.
The first winner to be showcased here, on Sun Studio page, and here, at SDN Program News, is Sandeep Koranne, whose entry describes how Sun Studio 12 compilers are used to engineer a complex, innovative discrete geometry algorithmic application. Sandeep is happy that he gets a 20% boost from Sun Studio compilers over GCC. But more than just performance, using Sun Studio 12 Compilers allowed him to "experiment with data-structures, perform automated performance tuning and overall presented a better environment for complex algorithmic coding, where the scientific researcher uses the programming environment to not only develop the code, but also to document and collaborate about the algorithm and methods used in the application" . The code is written in Standard C++, uses STL and written with portability in mind. Sandeep uses an IDE feature for Automated Task List generation innovatively to collect a list of "TODO" items. Neat!
Good work, Sandeep. And congratulations!
And congratulations to the other winners as well.
Posted by tatkar ( Oct 21 2009, 09:59:05 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Wednesday October 14, 2009

OOW, day2: Sun, Oracle performance showcase
It was heartening to see a lot of Sun Hardware at Oracle OW. For years, I've tried to persuade Sun TechDays and other folks to showcase Sun hardware at these developer shows, but its never really materialized in any meaningful way. Sure, theres the odd server for virtualization, etc at the shows, but that was mostly it.
By comparison, there was plenty of Sun HW here. I'm going to try and list out some of the big, hunking boxes I saw in the Sun booth and elsewhere. I'm sure my list isnt complete; I expect I will update this blog to make it more so. For now, here goes, what I saw.

Top of the list, of course, is the Sun Oracle Exadata Version 2(tagline: Hardware from Sun, Software from Oracle). Basically an OLTP database machine billed as twice as fast as its predecessor. This was the treat of the show, showcased just outside the Keynote location. Impressive piece of iron and it drew a lot of crowds (both onlookers as well as buyers, from what I hear).
StorageTek Modular Library system with 200 to 3000 cartridge slots (machine on display had 700). With a robotic arm that was continuously in motion, this machine made an impressive demo. And it was placed right next to our SunStudio booth, which drew curious onlookers.
Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage, aka Amber Road. This is an amazing amount of data (those on display were 12TB systems) in a small form-factor and with some amazing ease of administration to go with it.
Sun Storage Flash Array system. This is the secret sauce that makes the Exadata database machine tick! Flash speeds are the talk of the town since they have the potential to increase IOPS by an order of magnitude and save $$$ by making disk/Flash tradeoffs for throughput, storage and price.
Rackmount Servers: Mostly featured at the Demo stations were rackmounts systems based on UltraSPARC T2 (Enterprise T5240 servers), or Nehalem (Sun Fire X4450 servers) or AMD servers (Sun Fire 4240 servers)

Besides this, there were banners about the Sun branded database machine built out of UltraSPARC T2 5440s that recently claimed #1 status in all 7 key benchmarks (follow this link). The message was clear, from what I could tell: Sun is going to bring performance to the game and Oracle will optimize all Software to work efficiently on Solaris and Sun systems. In view of recent press announcements touting World Record TPC-C performance and a promise to keep Sun customers happy by investing even more in Sun technology than previously, this showcasing of Sun hardware bodes well for Sun customers as well as for Oracle's enterprise partners and customers. Best of all, there seems to be a palpable excitement in both companies about the synergies around this acquisition that was hard to miss both from the Sun booth as well as the Oracle booths.
Posted by tatkar ( Oct 14 2009, 01:58:32 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Tuesday October 13, 2009

First impressions from Oracle OpenWorld
Yesterday was my first day at OOW. Even though there were some scintillating events over the weekend, in particular these keynotes from Sun's Scott McNealy & James Gosling(view here) and Oracle's Larry Ellison (view here), I wasnt at that portion of OOW.
My first impressions, even before I entered Moscone, was Wow! The place was entirely taken over by Oracle. Buses ran billboards advertising Oracle and the event, there was even a huge tent between Moscone North and South, reserved as dining area and essentially closing Howard Street (picture here). There was even the scale model BMW Oracle Racing High-tech Catamaran on display at the Fourth and Howard Streets intersection. Exhibitions were in Moscone South AND Moscone West. Essentially, that 6 block area was nothing but Oracle OpenWorld.
My second impression was suits. Lots and lots of them. Essentially different from IDF, which billed itself as the next, next, next big thing, and JavaOne, which is clearly a hacker's conference (and where James reminded Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz that he was out of place in his suit at the keynote and got huge applause from the audience), this one is a carefully and well-scripted conference. I could not listen to the entire keynote from Phillips and Catz (view here), but what I could hear was very carefully laid out and executed. One astounding fact I gathered (and later could relate to): Oracle has over 3000 products and the portfolio is growing ever faster!
So, I had booth duty on the exhibition floor. Moscone South. Essentially a technology, but even more importantly, a services showcase. All the major partners were there: HP, IBM, Dell, AMD, Intel and of course Sun. And also, networking and wireless partners like Cisco, Brocade, AT&T, Blackberry and Verizon. But also, Infosys, CSC, NetApp, Deloitte, Wipro, EDS, Accenture, KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCooper, Tata Consulting (TCS). I'm singling out that last list because I havent seen them at any of the developer conferences I usually go to (Sun TechDays, JavaOne, IDF, LinuxWorld, etc). Oracle itself was fairly hidden (or backgrounded), giving their partners essentially all the glory and topspots on the floor. [Moscone West has a HUGE, HUGE Salesforce.com presence which I intend to check out today].
There was a Cloud booth (for those of you who think Oracle is anti-Cloud) and I engaged in some interesting and long discussions with vendors in that booth (except Amazon, I'll corner them today, because they are more of a known quantity as far as I'm concerned, so unlikely that I'll learn anything new). On-Demand computing seems to have a big presence in what Oracle calls "DemoGrounds" (see this picture, eg).
The Sun booths were very strategic and visible. Right next to the main entrance. We had some foot traffic, but for the Sun Studio booth, mostly non-existent. I probably talked to about a dozen to 15 non-Sun folks and some of them were even Oracle folks, who I knew by email before. Given that the crowd was a suited, mostly business IT type crowd, I am not surprised. A few that came by were disappointed that we didnt run on Windows, but were suitably impressed by the offering and demo when I showed them what we had.
An interesting day. Tiring, since the shift turned out to be a 5+ hour shift without a lot of interesting traffic, but I think I learned a bit from others there. Which makes it entirely worthwhile.
More details tomorrow, I hope.

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 13 2009, 10:58:37 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Friday October 09, 2009

New SunStudio Screencast on Improving Performance of Parallel Codes
Cool new video from Darryl just showed up on Sun's HPC site. In this video, Sun Studio expert, Darryl Gove, shows how you can use Sun Studio Performance Analyzer to improve performance of a parallel application. Darryl uses the Mandelbrot set application to highlight the features. This screencast is also one of the demos we will run at Oracle OpenWorld that I mentioned in my previous blog.
Take about 15 mins to view it. You will learn something about OpenMP, parallelization and even Mandelbrot sets.

Watch Now

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 09 2009, 03:24:19 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Friday September 25, 2009

What I saw at IDF09
After a short break, I'm back in blogland. In the meantime, I and my team have moved back from Sun's Cloud Computing Engineering organization to Sun Studio (Compilers and Tools). It was a wonderful ride and I learned so many things that I intend to build on, in coming months. Of course, my group is still involved in the same Cloud-related tools project of making HW, SW stack and tools more easily accessible to developers who dont have OpenSolaris (or Solaris) on their desktop and may not have access to a SPARC machine in their development group. More on that in the coming weeks, but right now I'll turn to Sun Studio related activities.

This was the week for Intel Developer Forum 09 (Sept 22-24, Moscone West, San Francisco).
Last year, the emphasis seemed to be on Nehalem, AVX, Graphics and Parallelism.
This year, the emphasis seems to be around Mobility, some followup on Parallelism and Cloud Computing. Intel is totally on top of the world with the Nehalem chip: a well-balanced, high performance chip with a great feature set that the company can build their entire roadmap on. They are on a high, and know they have a winner in Nehalem.
This year again, we were invited to have a booth and a Chalk Talk at the conference. The booth duty was interesting and you really get to do some deep-dive type conversations with some interesting folks who walk by and we got our share, this year as well. Which makes it all worthwhile and stimulating. Its an ideal time to listen to what other developers have to say about our products (both good and bad and we heard both sides) and to share views on where the environment is headed. If you remember, I gave a Chalk Talk last year as well. This year's talk was in our own booth, so it was more lightly attended but it was fun (and chaotic) as well. My focus was on Compiler performance and the new World Records we have created since the launch of Nehalem systems (get details here: http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/software/index.jsp and look for the Sun Studio logo), on new features (OpenMP 3.0, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, ), new parallelization assistance tools (DBXtool, MPI analyzer, Profiling D-trace like with D-light and DTrace GUI), ease-of-development with a fully-integrated IDE (based on NetBeans 6.5 with considerably enhanced C/C++ support) and continuous ongoing improvements (lots of improvements on the performance side, with better vectorizer, register allocator, instruction scheduler, etc, an improved Performance Analyzer and Thread Analyzer with support for new HW counters and too many to describe here in details). Look up here for more details.

Intel itself build IDF as a showcase for next, next, next generation of technologies. What was truly interesting was how much focus there was on Cloud Computing. They had two dedicated 3-day track on this (one for Public Cloud and another for Enterprise Cloud), but more than that, it was interspersed at many of the other talks as well. The emphasis was clearly on educating on technologies they provide to enhance Datacenters:

Networking: with 10Gb controllers, reduced IO latency in Nehalem and LAN/SAN interconnect fabric.
Storage: with a big push towards SSD/Flash (better iops/$) to create right balance between cost and IOps needs
Virtualization: HW assist, VM density, performance and power efficiency, enhanced IO virtualization
Security enhancements by highlighting AES(Advanced Encryption) and TXT(Trusted Execution) features in the chips
Performance of Nehalem chips which allows for optimized SW and reduced datacenter costs

The impression I got was that they were pushing Clouds for Enterprises that needed hyper-scale efficiency that was utilitarian (rather than differentiating) with homogeneous HW with greater focus on cost of initial ownership (rather than TCO, they arent convinced that Clouds differentiate on TCO). In fact, IMO, their view was strongly datacenter-centric, rather than Cloud as an elastic, available, multi-tenant, heterogenous, business-critical, differentiating sort of view. Not that they didnt think these issues werent important, but it looked like they werent going to address them as they werent core to Intel. Fair enough, but its important to know how one of the primary technology providers view this.

Posted by tatkar ( Sep 25 2009, 12:27:12 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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