Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Monday November 27, 2006

HPCS/DARPA and Sun: An invitation to a podcast
You have probably seen the news by now that IBM and Cray won the third phase of the HPCS/DARPA contract. Of the three finalists, Sun was the unlucky player not to be invited to play here, despite presenting a strong portfolio. I was asked what my views were, of this news.
Let me start off by saying that I am not privy to any details of the Sun bid, except maybe a few reports from talking to colleagues who have participated in the bid. So I'll give you the somewhat more useful set of pointers that might give you a better clue, first, then I'll opine (in a strictly IMO fashion).

First of all, you might want to check out these blogs within Sun:
http://blogs.sun.com/innovation/

An in-depth podcast, in MP3 is available here. Jim Mitchell and David Douglas talk about life after HPCS. Jim Mitchell is a Sun Fellow and leader of this project; David Douglas is Sun's Associate Director of the HPCS program. [The MP3 program is a 13+-minute podcast]
A summary of their podcast:

DARPA has given Sun a wonderful leverage to commercialization of technologies from single- to petascale machines
Sun's involvement in HPC market is much stronger now than it was before this program and that Sun has used the program to advance both Hardware and Software aspects
SunLabs has used this to achieve not some pure research advancements but to apply these technologies to give Sun products a leg-up
DARPA gave an opportunity to look at computing at large/massive scale, particularly in software and productivity and in particular, this will help drive growth opportunity in the industry, not just for compute-intensive sites
Look at what Fortress brings to the table. See here for more info. Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability.
DARPA support or not, Sun is continuing the charge towards peta-scale computing.

Lastly, let me add that IMO, yes, it is unfortunate that Sun didnt get the grant. It would have helped this effort tremendously, especially in bringing a sharper focus to this endeavor. But the HPC effort within Sun is at a point of no return; there is great momentum around Sun's HPC programs (Sun has made inroads into Top and Sun has recently announced a slew of new hardware, software and services to enable customers to quickly build up an HPC environment
Sun does have a contrarian view in terms of where this scale of computing is headed. You might want to read Greg Papadopoulos's provocative blog on why "The World Only Needs Five Computers". Greg P is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Sun and is responsible for managing Sun's technology decisions and architecture. His team leads Sun Labs, the DARPA High Performance Computing Systems program, global engineering architecture and advanced development programs.