Monday May 05, 2008
Not NASDAQ - solar power. The ASES annual solar energy conference is in San Diego this week. The top question I get about my solar panels is how long is my return on investment? I did calculate it before we installed them. At current electricity prices and time value of money they will just break even over their useful life. (And we live near the ocean where morning fog obscures the panels on many summer mornings.) Still, if we had another price shock equivalent to the 1973 oil embargo they would pay back about twice the initial investment, in current dollars. And if we had another price shock equivalent to Kenny-Boy Lay's market manipulation, they would pay back about five times the initial investment. Economically, call the panels zero cost insurance.
Now what's the ROI on an SUV? Our solar panels cost about a quarter to a half the price of a big SUV. Will that Escalade have a productive life of 20 years? And over that time how many dollars will it return to your pocket? Or will it perhaps take more money out of your pocket? For the price of the SUV you could instead buy solar panels, zero out your electric bill, buy a Chevy Malibu (which sits in clogged traffic equally well as the SUV), and have enough money left over to pay for over 200,000 miles worth of gas for it, at $4/gallon.
So why aren't there more solar panels in sunny Southern California? Why is Germany, in the cloudy wintery north, so far ahead of the U.S.? Two reasons: (1) money, and (2) money.
(1) Lots of people don't have the luxury of deciding whether to spend discretionary money on a new SUV or on solar panels; they're deciding whether to pay the mortgage, pay the electric bill, or fill up the gas tank. Ditto businesses hard pressed to show a profitable bottom line. Increasingly solar energy entrepreneurs are in effect buying energy "drilling rights" on rooftops. LA's electric utility Edison is building the equivalent of a new generating plant by putting panels on the roofs of commercial and industrial buildings. The building owners pay nothing, and get a good long term locked in electricity rate. Here in San Diego, Hewlett-Packard is converting its campus to solar power. HP stockholders will pay nothing for it, and HP will get substantial energy cost savings in the future. While they're at it, HP is matching the rebate to their employees who want to put solar panels on their homes.
(2) The recent earth shaking discovery that people are more willing to give goods and services in exchange for money, than to give them with nothing in return. (See capitalism.) The biggest barrier to local development of solar energy in San Diego has been a convoluted rate structure that in many cases actually made businesses that installed solar generators pay more money to use less electricity, than before they installed them. Small wonder that northern California is far ahead of sunnier southern California in solar power installations. Now that crazy rate structure is changing, which could bring a boom in locally generated solar power.
For homeowners in San Diego no change is forthcoming. Germany has all those solar installations because of a rate structure that pays for solar electricity at much higher than market rates. In San Diego you see many solar panel installations like ours covering a small portion of the roof. The rate structure here is fair up to the point that you replace your total annual electricity usage with solar power. Produce more than you use, however, and all the excess is just "donated" to the utility without compensation. So you're okay if your solar installation is a bit smaller than you need, but it's economic madness to make it any larger than you need. If not for this rate structure, our solar panel installation could have produced enough electricity for one or two of our neighbors in addition to our own needs.
Tuesday Apr 15, 2008
Cooltst v3.0 is out, updated to assess workload suitability for single- and multi-chip CMT. When the UltraSPARC T1 was released, Cool Threads Selection Tool (cooltst) was developed to help gauge how well given workloads might run on the new chip which traded speed for throughput, allowing cooler, lower power, lower cost computing for many applications. But which applications? A single threaded application would tap just a tiny fraction of the 8 cores and 32 hardware threads of the UltraSPARC T1 processor.
Much has changed since then. There is much empirical data showing various applications running well on CMT. The UltraSPARC T2 processor was released, increasing CMT power to 64 hardware threads. This processor also added dedicated floating point units per core so that, far from being relegated to a niche web server market, it claimed (and still holds) a high performance computing record.
Now UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems have been released, further extending CMT power to 2 chips, 8 cores per chip, 8 hardware threads per core - 128 virtual CPU's in a 1RU box. Cooltst helps you assess how well your workload may tap that throughput potential. You can read about it and download it starting at sunsource.net.
There's nothing magical about cooltst's heuristics. You can make much the same assessment yourself using ordinary tools like ps (to look at the software threads) and cpustat (to look at instruction characteristics). All the source code is included so you can see what it's doing. On Linux systems a loadable kernel module is included to measure instruction characteristics in place of Solaris' built-in cpustat command. The output of cooltst is tabular data and a narrative description and of your workload characteristics, and a bottom line recommendation.
Disclosure Statement:
SPEC and SPEComp are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results are current as of 11/11/2007. Complete results may be found at the url referenced above or at http://www.spec.org/omp/results/ompm2001.html
My photo:
Iguazu Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brazil. It's over twice as big as Niagara Falls in terms of water flow, because it covers such a wide area.
Friday Apr 11, 2008
The International Autonomous Robotics Competition is coming to San Diego in June, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds! Thanks to the San Diego Java Users Group and Wintriss Technical Schools, kids can compete in building and programming robots. The kids will use Sun SPOT which are - of course - the open source robot tool kits. They'll program the robots in Java. Eric Arseneau writes all about the robot competition. I think my boy is a bit young to be writing software, but he's taken me by surprise many times before. Contest or not, he wants me to get him a robot kit, which he thinks I must be able to pick up in the office any day.
Wednesday Apr 09, 2008
Nothing is more fun than arguing with BM Seer. He usually helps me more than anyone in keeping everyone at Sun in compliance with SPEC's fair use rules. But in a recent posting on SPECweb2005 for Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 he refers to SPEC published results as "Certified." Actually as the official SPEC disclaimer spells out, "the contents of any SPEC reporting page are the
submitter's responsibility. SPEC makes no warranties about the accuracy
or veracity of this data."
Most SPEC benchmark results can be used without SPEC review. They must comply with all the run and reporting rules, including the requirement for a full disclosure report. And their rules compliance can be challenged on the basis of the details in that report. There is a real value to readers, and hence to vendors, of publishing a result at spec.org. Such results are peer reviewed by other SPEC committee members including competitors, prior to publication. If a result is found to be not in compliance with the run rules it is not published, and the result cannot be used elsewhere either. However, passing this review is not a guarantee or certification that the result is accurate.
Instead of a paid independent audit process, SPEC relies on full disclosure and peer review to increase confidence in the reliability of results. From the details in the full disclosure report anyone should be able to reproduce the performance experiment and obtain substantially the same results. From time to time competitors will conduct such replication experiments on each others' systems, and if they cannot get the same number they bring it to SPEC to either get some details of the test configuration that were erroneously left out of the full disclosure report, or to have the published result marked non-compliant. By this method SPEC dramatically lowers the cost of benchmarking, making it possible to have the thousands of results posted on spec.org, while keeping vendors honest by the fear of exposure and humiliation.
Sunday Apr 06, 2008
Jeff Tamarkin: "Simply labeling Barcelona's Ojos de Brujo a nuevo flamenco group is a
little like calling Disney World an amusement park: it's way too
inadequate a description." OdB is available at emusic.com. This music recommendation is specifically targeted to Alan Adamson, who enjoyed Bach por Flamenco. Coincidentally, Alan lives in Canada, and my favorite classical guitarist is Daniel Cox from Edmonton. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, Cox isn't recording now. He produced several albums during the early days of mp3.com when its business model was to give all the music free, and hope a few people would, like me, also buy some CD's of the same music in the hope that some of the money would make its way back to the artist and encourage them to keep playing.
Pick two is the Reggaeton Kings, also on emusic.com. Fortunate name for the band. If you've heard some Reggaeton and would like some more, where do you find it? In the old days you'd ask the knowledgeable clerk at the local record store. (Are you old enough to remember what a record store was?) The emusic categories are far too crude to find it. You could search for Don Omar, and along with some music find postings by purists sniffing that Don Omar isn't real Reggaeton. Or you can just search for the word, and the Kings come up. I'm surely missing lots of Reggaeton from bands with less fortunate names, but that's okay because the Kings are as the album cover says, Lo Mejor.
Saturday Apr 05, 2008
After wrestling with incompatibilities of 64-bit Linux for a while, I finally downgraded my home PC to 32-bit Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). I found some nice and less nice workarounds, like running the Windows version of Firefox under Wine in order to get Flash to work. I hadn't found a workaround for the Java browser plugin, or for Skype, and was considering a 32-bit chroot environment.
Finally one of those automatic updates decided it for me. You know the ones, the messages offering later versions of software, critical security updates and recommended updates. Being able to just click OK to automatically be upgraded to the latest software is part of what makes Ubuntu so friendly. But this time it wasn't so friendly. Something left my PC unable to boot to multi-user, unable to start networking, and unable to start graphics. I don't know what because I didn't keep the disk image around for a post-mortem. It was much much faster simply to blow away my root partition with a complete new OS installation. So while I was at it, I dropped down to 32-bit.
Lots of things started working, but some got worse. I had always had a problem on Gutsy that after suspend/resume the Ethernet driver would get a reversed MAC address, complain that it was invalid, and switch to a new eth instance with a random MAC. Of course this played havoc with my router trying to keep track of where my PC was in order to provide DNS. This problem occurs in the forcedeth driver, reverse engineered for the nForce chipset. Some people worked around the problem with limited success by adding commands in the suspend/resume scripts to stop and restart networking.
But now on 32-bit Gutsy it got worse. Upon resuming the screen stayed black, and since the network seemed to be down I couldn't remotely login to find out what was wrong. I found lots of reports on the web about suspend/resume problems with the same error message in my .xsession-errors
Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This seems related to my NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE graphics. Like many others who posted their experiences, the problem occurred for me both with the generic open source driver and with the Nvidia proprietary accelerated driver. One person mentioned a workaround by logging out, logging in to a failsafe X-terminal, and suspending manually from there.
Irony: The main reason I'm running Ubuntu instead of Solaris is that Solaris doesn't yet have power management, and for a home PC, suspend and resume are essential. I've been eagerly watching the power mangement project Tesla at opensolaris.org, wondering why it's taking so long. I guess like most things it's easier to do, than it is to do right. By comparison, my PC's when running Windows 98SE often fail to wake up at all, and those running Windows XP tend to wake up by themselves, unbidden. The only systems where suspend/resume always worked were Linspire and, of course, MacOS.
Neither workaround by itself would work for me, but putting them both together I end up with a clumsy workaround that lets me suspend/resume, and may possibly point the way towards a less cumbersome workaround.
- Disable networking via gnome panel
- Logout
- Select failsafe X-terminal session
- Login
- sudo /etc/acpi/sleep.sh
- (system sleeps)
- (normal wakeup by pressing ENTER)
- Logout
- Select normal gnome session
- Login
- Enable networking via gnome panel
Sunday Mar 30, 2008
Finishing my list of SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, I want to thank some of the many people who have made invaluable contributions to the organization behind the scenes. As before I won't cite names without permission, but will add them later if given the okay.
All those thousands of SPEC results make their way through committee peer review and publication, thanks to the efforts of a web site editor volunteer from Intel, and two SPEC IT staff, Jason Glick and Cathy Sandifer. Behind the public web site is a members only web site and other servers, for collaboration on benchmark development and results review. Their job is merely keeping all this infrastructure up and running through disasters, natural and man-made (telco made, that is), while the number of benchmarks, member institutions, and participants grows rapidly, and the services to members continue to expand.
Distributing the network load worldwide, and providing redundancy in case of outages, are mirror sites at the University of Miami, U.S., and the University of Pavia, Italy. The IT coordinators at those universities were given awards for their work.
Though the benchmarks keep getting more complex, it keeps getting easier to run them, to collect, review, and publish the data without errors, and then to search and select the desired information to view. Along with our SPEC IT staff, Cloyce Spradling of Sun has done spectacular work building and maintaining these tools, and adapting them for new benchmarks.
Nobody enjoys flying these days, but we have to collaborate to get our work done. And coming from 82 different companies and institutions each with its own internal IT standards, no single vendor solution is going to work for us. Our virtual meeting facilities project was driven by Alan Adamson of IBM, an engineer from Dell, and an engineer from BEA. It has allowed us to be more productive than ever while cutting the number of physical meetings. Result: a little less CO2 dumped in the atmosphere, a little less green spent on travel by member companies, and some fewer hours of confinement in airplanes endured by SPEC participants.
Organizing the work of 82 member institutions and SPEC staff is like the proverbial cat herding. Paula Smith of VMware and Alan Adamson of IBM have managed to do it. Paula is a Vice-president of SPEC in charge of headquarters operations, and Alan is chair of the Open Systems Group steering committee. John Henning of Sun, secretary of the Open Systems Group steering committee led a comprehensive overhaul of organization policy - clearer, fewer loopholes, better guidance. And Klaus Lange of HP helped make sure that the result was accessible to new members so you don't have to be in an "old boys network" to work in SPEC.
A staff member from SPEC HQ, organizes our meetings among other jobs. This is everything from finding meeting hotels and negotiating rates to acquiring an extra projector or speaker phone, and essentially solving any problem that comes up. She makes sure our meetings are productive and low cost.
Bob Cramblitt certainly deserves some good publicity for all the work he has done for SPEC over the years. Of course trying to give him publicity by posting on my personal blog is ironic because his business is public relations. I may get only a few dozen readers, but whenever we really need to reach our target audience to get the word out about a new benchmark, Bob's the guy to get it done. He also has a very good sense for when a reporter does not want to talk to a PR flack, and needs to get the information directly from the engineers.
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
How fast is your file server? SPEC has released a new network file server benchmark, SPECsfs2008. A follow on to the SFS97_R1 benchmark for NFS file servers, the new benchmark adds support for the CIFS protocol. Of course NFS transaction rates cannot be compared with CIFS transaction rates because the workloads are completely different. Both workloads draw from real world measurements of thousands of customer sites. More client types are supported and the benchmark is easier to use than ever.
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
More SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, to members of the power committee who produced the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark. This wasn't an easy benchmark to do, taking us into areas of engineering not so familiar to performance analysts. Along the way we picked up some new contributors, and some of us picked up some new knowledge and skills. Energy efficiency is increasingly important, and eventually I expect to see power measurements as part of every performance benchmark. But for now, SPECpower_ssj2008 is a great start that establishes a fair and practical methodology for consistent measurement.
As before I won't cite names without permission, but will add them later if given the okay. SPEC thanks:
- Paul Muehr from AMD
- Greg Darnell, and another engineer from Dell
- Karin Wulf, and another engineer from Fujitsu-Siemens
- Klaus Lange, and another engineer from HP
- Jeremy Arnold, Alan Adamson, and another engineer from IBM
- Anil Kumar, and two other engineers from Intel
- an engineer from Sun
- Michael Armbrust from UC Berkeley RAD Lab
Friday Feb 22, 2008
Another SPECtacular award given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, this to Stephen Pratt of Communigate Systems, a member of SPEC's mail server committee. Our current benchmark SPECmail2001 tests performance using SMTP and POP3 protocols. The next major version will test the IMAP protocol, a much needed addition to measure enterprise email. Email server performance is important. If you think you get a lot of email in your inbox, then look in your spam folder. 95% of all email is now spam, meaning that mail servers must have 20 times the capacity they would need to carry only legitimate email.
Stephen has done a great job on the benchmark code, managing to carry on with the work across a job change. In addition, he even found time to help the virtualization committee integrate the IMAP benchmark into their benchmark.
Thursday Feb 21, 2008
More SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, these to members of the Web Committee. As before, I won't post anyone's name without permission, but you know who you are and SPEC is grateful for your contributions.
It's a bit more complicated to tell you what these engineers did to earn this recognition. In 2007 SPEC released a maintenance version 1.20 to SPECweb2005 which included a lot of improvements. Most notable to me are new code that extends the level playing field of comparison, and tightened standards compliance rules that ensure real world applicability.
In order to focus on performance of the web server, to simplify the configurations tested and so reduce the cost of benchmarking, SPECweb2005 uses a simulated back-end database, BESIM, instead of the database server typically found with real world web applications. The great majority of the computing load is, by design, on the web server. Therefore the database component being synthetic code has not been an issue with fair comparison across platforms. However we discovered that when using an ISAPI implementation, two Ethernet packets were exchanged per HTTP response instead of the single packet with other implementations. No such results had been published, so there were no unfair comparisons - yet. But the problem needed to be fixed in order that ISAPI solutions could be measured on a level playing field. The solution was to adapt BESIM to use ISAPI v2.0 interface based on the Windows IIS implementation (with permission from Microsoft), so now different solutions behave alike, and they behave like real world web servers.
Another potential risk to fair comparison was in the Java Server Pages (JSP) which is typically used in benchmark results in preference to other slower scripting languages like PHP. We added a requirement to the run rules that software products prove their standards compliance by passing the relevant test suite. In the case of JSP that means that web servers which say they implement JSP must really implement JSP, not a subset needed to run the benchmark but omiting some slower features needed to implement real world web applications. Again, we don't know of any published results which did gain a performance advantage by cutting corners on standards conformance. Now that the rules are tightened we know there won't be any.
Wednesday Feb 20, 2008
More SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, these to members of the System File Server Group. As before, I won't post anyone's name without permission, but you know who you are and SPEC is grateful for your contributions.
SPEC SFS97_R1 is SPEC's benchmark suite for evaluating performance of network file servers using the NFS protocol. The committee has been working to update the workload based on measurements at thousands of customer sites, add support for Windows and Mac OS X clients, and add support for the CIFS protocol. For this important work SPEC recognizes NSPlab, two engineers from another member company which prefers not to be thanked publicly, and Don Capps of NetApp, who is also known as the creator of the IOzone filesystem benchmark.
Tuesday Feb 19, 2008
Virtualization is such a hot technology that Dilbert is poking fun at it: 2/12, 2/13 and 2/14. No wonder, since IT centers must use both hardware and energy more efficiently. At SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco SPECtacular awards were given to members of the Virtualization committee. As always, I won't post anyone's name without permission, but you know who you are and SPEC is grateful for your contributions.
SPEC is working on a benchmark to model server consolidation of commonly virtualized systems such as mail servers, database servers, application servers, web servers, and file servers. Requiring a very different technical approach than SPEC's traditional benchmarks, virtualization has brought unique challenges. SPEC recognizes these engineers for outstanding contributions in meeting those challenges:
- Andrew Bond, HP
- Cathy Reddy, Unisys
- Chris Floyd, IBM
- Fred Abounador, AMD
- Greg Kopczynski and another engineer, VMware
- Nitin Ramannavar, Sun
- Stephen Pratt, Communigate
- and an engineer from a company so modest that they don't even want to accept public thanks.
Friday Feb 15, 2008
More SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, these to members of the High Performance Group. As before, I won't post anyone's name without permission, but you know who you are and SPEC is grateful for your contributions. SPEC MPI2007 is SPEC's benchmark suite for evaluating MPI-parallel, floating point, compute intensive performance across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). SPEC recognizes
They all played a big role in the creation of this benchmark, which extends SPEC's offerings of real world relevant measures of high performance computing performance to this important software architecture, and providing better metrics for evaluation of cluster and shared memory systems.
Thursday Feb 14, 2008
More SPECtacular awards given at SPEC's 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco, these to members of the Java committee. As before, I won't post anyone's name without permission, but you know who you are and SPEC is grateful for your contributions.
SPEC's Java committee maintains, reviews, and publishes benchmark results for SPECjvm98, the first industry standard benchmark of Java client performance; SPECjAppServer2004, the benchmark of Java application server performance; SPECjbb2005, the benchmark of Java server performance; and the newest SPECjms2007, the benchmark of Java Messaging Service performance.
SPECjvm is the only pre-Y2K benchmark in that list. Think how much CPU performance has improved and how much the Java platform has grown in scope from 1998 to today, and it's clear that SPECjvm98 is due for update which should be announced this quarter. Messaging is an increasingly crucial part of the Internet infrastructure, and of enterprise applications, but until the release of SPECjms2007 there was no standardized way to quantify the performance of various solutions.
Sam Kounev of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, was cited for his leadership as chair of SPEC's JMS team in driving and bringing SPECjms2007 to market. Key developers on the project included Kai Sachs from TU Darmstadt, Lawrence Cullen from IBM, and his team of messaging developers at IBM Hursley laboratory, UK, including Tim Dunn and Martin Ross. An engineer from Sun, Silicon Valley, was cited for specification and design of the benchmark and the run and reporting rules.
Stefan Sarne of BEA Systems, Stockholm, and Evgeniya Maenkova from Intel, St. Petersburg, Russia, were cited for coding, testing, and finalizing the new Java client benchmark.
Leading such a large committee with so many projects and so many company interests has not been an easy job, and we were fortunate in 2007 to have a very capable engineer from Intel as our Java chairman. He always did what he saw was right, putting SPEC's interests foremost. He is moving on to other assignments this year, and will be terribly missed at SPEC.
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PS - I'm not calling Bob a "PR flack." T...