Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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]