Onward
This is my final posting on this blog site. It has been a great three years at Sun, from which I've gained so much. Nowhere else have I had the opportunity to meet and work with some many brilliant and talented engineers in one place. It's been an honor and a privilege to be part of this team. Like your friends and even your competitors, I wish all of you, and the company, great success in these tough times. We'll always need a company like Sun Microsystems. My future blogs will be found on Searching for Wisdom.
Posted at 11:29AM Jan 30, 2009 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Focusing on the Customer
Over the last couple of weeks I've been involved with the Innovation at Sun Conference, where we get the senior technical leadership of the company together, and I spent a week in China speaking with students and universities about innovation. There's lots to blog about, which I'll try to do over the next couple of weeks, but I thought I'd start with a point I made in my introduction to the Innovation@Sun conference.
We often debate what makes good engineering. Should we spend the effort to create or improve a technology? Which of several approaches should we take in improving a product that we've built, including should we improve it at all? As engineers we tend to be biased in favor of elegance and the "coolness" of the technology being developed. While this is important, in the end there is a simpler way to look at it. Stated bluntly it is: "Our job is to make our customers rich." If they can use our technology, products, and services to to make larger profits than by using alternative techniques then they will buy what we sell and will come back for more.
Thus, the first question on almost any technical decision should be, How does this benefit the customer? Does the customer have an alternative that will be better for their business? If there is a better alternative from the customer's perspective then all of our elegance will be for naught. Especially in these tough economic times, everyone is looking for a way gain an edge on their competition. And they are eager to try new approaches that will give them that edge.
Sun's technology portfolio is vast and deep. We are in a unique position to put together enormously cost effective solutions to key customer problems, that would be difficult for slower moving competitors without the IP portfolio we have. A good example that we have started to talk about is our Open Storage Strategy and how it will revolutionize not only data storage, but data analytics and information life cycle management.
Coupling our technology portfolio with our focus on building communities around these core technologies; involving people with intimate knowledge of customer's issues and opportunities that depend on information technology, and leveraging our ability to create hardware/software/services systems that enable key customer opportunities it is hard to see how we can fail.
We just need to focus on making our customers rich, and they will return the favor.
Posted at 11:17AM Nov 06, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Ubuntu
No, this isn't a posting about Linux, this about the Boston Celtics, the new National Basketball Association champions! But, also about what we can learn from them. Now that the championship is over, everyone knows about the Celtics' phenomenal turn around---from the worst record in basketball to the Champions. While the new talent acquired last summer (Garnett and Allen) was important, adding a few more individual superstars to a team does not make them champions. They were able rise to this level and to beat the team with the "greatest player on the planet" by working and winning as a team, by focusing not on their personal appearances on highlight films, but on how to raise the level of their teammates and celebrate their successes.
Desmond Tutu has said, "A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed." Introduced to this ethic by Doc Rivers, this team has Ubuntu. While they have stars, it is their selfless play that has made them great. This could not have been made clearer than watching their defense, where as the Lakers moved the ball, the defense moved and swarmed as a unit. How else can you double team everyone on the floor?
This is essence of "Systemness". How well the components work together, how seamlessly they integrate makes a collection of components a cohesive, powerful system. But even this is not Ubuntu. How can each component make the other components better, perhaps even by diminishing their own performance. How can the synergistic integration of the components give the System an unfair advantage? This is question Systemness asks. And if the components have Ubuntu, this is the question with which the component designers and architects begin. And engineering teams with Ubuntu ask this of themselves and celebrate the successes of other teams, for the betterment of the whole, the System and the company, will lead to their own success.
Posted at 09:38AM Jun 18, 2008 by rezippel in Sports | Comments[1]
Another reminisce
Looking at Sin-Yaw Wang's blog a few minutes ago brought back some fun memories. I was amused by the reference to Lapsang Souchong tea and, in a more recent post, Richard Stallman. As it happens, I'm also drinking Lapsang Souchong right now (2:00AM and don't ask why). Back when I was a student, and RMS was working on Emacs and Lisp Machines, I was introduced to Lapsang Souchang by Gerry Sussman who called it "thesis tea." It was just as effective back then as it is now!
Just to bring up some other trivia, did you know that Richard Stallman and our own Guy Steele put together the initial key bindings for Emacs? I remember before that there were a number of different TECO based macro packges for "visual editing" or "control-R mode" in use in the AI lab/Project Mac at MIT, and we each had our own customizations with slightly different key bindings which drove all of us nuts. It was a pretty powerful environment though; I even formatted my Master's thesis (on radical denesting) in TXJ, a mathematical formatting system written in TECO! I'm still not sure whether that was heroic or just plain stupid, and it's debatable whether the mathematics in the thesis or the formatting was the greater intellectual achievement.
Posted at 02:06AM Jun 05, 2008 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
היום יומ הולדת
An experiment... excuse my Hebrew...
בדרך כלל אני כותב בענגלית אבל היום נראה לי עדיף להשתמש עברית. הל שטרן ואני מסכים על הרבה דברים חוץ מהמוזיקה. באוטו אני מעדיף לשמוע תקליטים של שלום חנוך ויהודה פוליקר ואין לי מוסג איך הל יכול לנהוג עם המוזיקה שלו. אני מתכונן ליום עבודה טם השירים כמו "אחרי הכל את שיר", "למה לי לקחת ללב" ו"אדם בתוך עצמו". וכדאי להתחיל כל ישיבת התקציב עם "מחכים למשיח"
חג שמח לכולם ומתפלל לשלום
Posted at 12:18PM May 08, 2008 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Project Caroline Video
Project Caroline presentation at the SunLabs Open house is now on line! Its almost two hours, but you get a bunch of bonuses. In addition detailed technical presentations and live demonstrations of Project Caroline by John McClain, Bob Scheifler and Vinod Johnson, you get Greg Papadopoulos' welcome to the Sunlabs Open house (lot's of other good stuff there, take a look here for the slides and here for pointers to video presentations) and my introductory comments on why Project Caroline is architected as a high level virtualization platform across all aspects of the IT infrastructure (computation, communications, and storage). Here it is:
We've been getting a bunch of comments about Project Caroline in other blogs and press reports. We're really happy at how positive they've been. Here I'd like to clarify some details.
- Project Caroline supports applications built in a number of languages. Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP are supported now. Others are being considered for future development.
- While we are optimistic about the capabilities of Project Caroline, we really don't really think that "all applications will tie back to Sun servers on the Internet". More accurately, we're really bullish about the ability to develop, deploy, and deliver software services on the Internet and think that Project Caroline and similar platforms are a great approach.
- We currently provide instances of Postgres databases. You don't have to install or configure the databases software to use it, you just request a database instance. This is an example of Project Caroline's attitude of allowing developers to focus on the applications they want to build with minimal attention to details of of operating a data center. We have a lot of work to do on the storage side, but it's fair to assume that we'll provide MySQL at some point as well as other mechanisms.
- The Web server component is a pre-release version of GlassFish v3 that has been adapted to the Project Caroline infrastructure and, with changing loads, can automatically flex its resource utilization. See Vinod's section at the end of the video for more details.
- The Project Caroline web site is built using Drupal and actually runs on the Project Caroline infrastructure (we really are eating our own dog food!). More details can be found here.
- Finally, we really are an open source research project. You can download all of our software from the Project Caroline web site and see how we've done all the magic you see in the video. The software all uses the GPLv2 license, and we really aren't holding anything back. Take a look at what we've done, how we've done it, and let us know what you think.
Technorati Tags:
ProjectCaroline, Redshift, Cloud Computing
Posted at 10:10AM Apr 22, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[2]
Project Caroline
I feel like a proud papa! Earlier this week my team had the opportunity to show off the research they've on the development and deployment of horizontally scaled Internet services. The most tangible result is the research platform Project Caroline. We have a Project Caroline grid running and connected to the Internet. We are allowing external research partners to use this "public evaluation" grid, as resources allow. (If you are internal to Sun, we have an internal grid on which we can give you access.)
We've posted an article on Project Caroline on the Sun Research site: "A Platform ... as a Service". During the Sun Labs Open House we also gave a presentation on Project Caroline that included a couple of demos. The video of the presentation should be available soon.
It's a really cool platform that allows you to programmatically control all of the infrastructure resources you might need in building a horizontally scaled system. You can allocate and configure databases, file systems, private networks (VLAN's), load balancers, and a lot more, all dynamically, which makes it easy to flex the resources your application uses up and down as required.
One of the things I like the best, since I never write perfect code, is the NetBeans plug-in that allows you to monitor the behavior of application running on the grid, from your laptop; and then debug, single step, etc. any of the processes or resources you have running on the grid. No more writing and testing applications on your laptop only to port them to grid environment, and spend more time debugging. Instead, with Project Caroline, you write you code in NetBeans and run it the first time directly on the grid and debug it there, just as if it were running on your laptop but in the real production environment!
If you want to take a closer look at Project Caroline go to the the Project Caroline Web site, where you can find documentation, samples applications, tools for using the grid, and discussion forums. All of our source code is licensed under GPLv2, and can be found on the web site.
Finally, remember this is part of a research project in the Sun Chief Technologist's Office where we exploring different approaches to utility computing. We are eager to see what in this approach works and what doesn't, where this approach fits and for what problems it doesn't. Let us know.
Technorati Tags: redshift, ProjectCaroline
Posted at 03:02PM Apr 11, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
Redshift in Second Life
Steve Wilson gave a presentation on Virtualization in Second Life a month or so ago: Friday Feb 01, 2008: My Trip to Second Life that went very well. Now it seems that I've been roped in as well. I'll be speaking about Redshift, Virtualization, and our research activity, Project Caroline at at Second Life time 10:00AM, i.e., 1:00PM Eastern time at the Von Neumann Convention Center on Dr. Dobbs Island (Search for "Sun's Zippel").
Jessica from the Sun Second Life team put together my avatar and I got a great introduction on navigating Second Life form Ed Wetland of Sun. I now understand why people like Second Life so much. My avatar is a lot better looking than I am in person, and much more atheletic.
It should be fun tomorrow. Come join in!
Technorati Tags: redshift, Second Life
Posted at 12:46AM Mar 06, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
WW Education and Research Conference
It's been a while since I last posted, and this really should be the last time I make that apology---get real! This week, I'm attending the Sun's Education and Research Conference and got involved in a couple of pretty interesting discussions.
First, the technology that grabbed everyone is virtual reality. Aaron Walsh, from Boston College, gave a series of wonderful demo's of uses of interactive, 3D technology in education. An example of this is the Theban Mapping Project, which allows the visitor to explore tombs of the Pharaohs. It's a great site and worth a visit. Compared to your standard, musty textbooks, you can imagine how much more engaging a site like that can be for a student, and how much fresher it can be for the academic.
As interesting as such a site might be, even more compelling demonstrations were shown where students could participate in explorations of spaces like the Valley of the Kings. A related technology, which we are using at Sun is MPK20/Project Wonderland, which provides a 3D virtual space for collaboration and dissemination of information. There's a great demo here that everyone should watch. It's a great glimpse into what the office, and school room, of the future could be.
There was an interesting presentation by Neil Howe on the Millennials, the generation of people born since 1982. He brought up a lot of interesting characteristics millenials, but one that I think is relevant is that they tend to multi-process much more than people of my generation. They are constantly IM-ing, emailing, and twittering with their friends. Their active groups aren't geographically defined. In many ways, they have begun the process of breaking the limits of our physical locality. They don't need to find a single, centrally located coffee-house to get together. When they share a bottle of wine, it doesn't need to a single bottle.
How does this affect the way that students learn? Won't the physical models we are creating in these 3D models be limiting to our students? Should their avatars exist in more than one place at once? Can't we as educators use this dispersive existence to help identify the connections between different topics in education. While exploring the Thebes, shouldn't we also be exposed to the developments in China? The state of language in different regions?
In other words, aren't we limited enough in the real world by having a single localized physical body? Why do we need to be similarly limited in virtual worlds?
Posted at 07:26PM Feb 27, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Red Sox Clinch!
I came to Boston for college so long ago, locals remembered Ted Williams' rookie year. I lived in Kenmore Square as an undergraduate and I spent my summers either sailing, watching Red Sox games from $0.50 bleacher seats (that's not a typo), sailing on the Charles, or learning a little computer science across the river. So, in my bones I know the Red Sox are always going to raise your hopes in the summer and dash them on the rocks in September, or October if we were lucky. I was one of those that willed Carlton Fiske's home run to the right of the foul pole in game six of the 1975 World Series.
2004 was exhilarating and felt like the beginning of a new era, even though the management traded away some of the heroes. This year was amazing, the Red Sox (finally) had pitching, they ran, and while their hitting was OK, it wasn't the dominating hitting they had in 2004. This sounded good. But then a 12 game lead evaporated, and the Yankees swept the final series.
But is sure was sweet for them to clinch because Mariano Rivera gave up three runs and Orioles pulling off a bases loaded bunt! Hal, I feel your pain about the Yankees. That too shall pass, perhaps in 86 years.
Posted at 03:28AM Sep 29, 2007 by rezippel in Sports | Comments[1]
On the Boston/SFO Shuttle
Like a lot of people at Sun I tend to travel to the Bay area a lot. My last trip, which I'm still trying to finish has been a doozy. It started with my rental car. Now, I don't need much, I've only got a carry on bag and a laptop. So why did Avis give me a Minivan?? Just parking finding a sufficient parking space for the thing took effort, and once I found a space, with it took a major dose of Boston parking experience to parallel park it.
The business part of the trip went well, we have over 160 submissions to Innovation@Sun in October! That great response and I this to be a great conference. Meetings, more meetings, and then its time to head to the airport.
I've been looking at for a new cell phone for a while, and I've tried out a number Verizon 8830 (poor IMAP support for email), Nokia E62 (good IMAP, lousy interface), etc. At the airport I thought I saw something magical. As I was heading towards the shuttle from the rental car spot, I saw someone typing on their cell phone with one hand....and each time he typed a little puff of steam rose from the cell phone! A ha, just what I need to be eco-responsible, a steam powered cell phone! Or was this part of the advertising campaign around the new Harry Potter book? As I got closer, my wonder changed to dismay. He was holding a cigarette. How could this be in California? I though cigarette's had been banned! My search for a cellphone continues.
Next, get to the gate, to head home for a few meetings on Friday, and nice weekend with the family and then back to California on Monday. Or so I thought... The boarding time comes and goes, and finally they announce that plane is being serviced for an electrical problem and if it isn't ready in 20 minutes they will cancel the flight. And then they mention that the plane has been in the service bay since last night for this problem. If 12 hours wasn't enough time to fix the plane, then I doubt 20 more minutes will help. So race to the service desk, ahead of 100 others, and discover that every flight to Boston for Thursday and Friday is booked. But no problem, they can route me through Chicago, and I might find a standby spot on another flight to Boston, there's three possibilities after I arrive. I agree, I haven't been to Chicago in a while.
When I arrive in Chicago, the first thing I discover, is that 2 of the 3 flights to Boston have been cancelled. And the one remaining flight is running a little late. The plane at the gate ahead of the Boston flight (2 hours after its departure time), is still there. That flight is being rescheduled and the plane towed to the service bay. Needless to say, there are no standby spaces on the flight.
A few hours later, I'm in some airport hotel, (the shuttles where broken, and it only took an hour to send a replacement). Hungry and ready for bed. What else do I have to do, I'll write a blog entry....
But you know, that idea of a steam power cellphone isn't bad. I wonder if its been patented yet?
Posted at 07:50AM Jul 20, 2007 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
A Fable on On Arms and Armies
Once upon a time there was a family named Scawa whose trade was making swords. The family was very proud of the swords they made; they took great care designing their swords and their level of craftsmanship produced swords that were popular and had a great following. In time, new weapons came to be and marginalized the family's sword trade. Being clever and industrious they adapted to the new business and began producing bullets.
As with he sword business, the family were supreme craftsman and produced the best bullets that money could buy. Their bullets flew farther and were more accurate than their competitors. They were able to charge a premium for their bullets and became prosperous. One of their motto's was "You only need one Scawa bullet to hit your target," because an expert shot with a Scawa bullet was sure to find his mark with each firing. Things were again looking up for the Scawa family until industrialization affected the bullet business. Other families could suddenly make bullets with machines, and though the quality wasn't as good as the Scawa bullets, they required less skill to create and could be produced much more cheaply.
For a while the Scawa family tried to sell their premium bullets, but they were only successful with marksmen and others who demanded the highest quality bullets, and had the resources to pay the Scawa prices. Each year their sales dropped and they family began to worry about their future.
At this point the Scawa family had two sons. The oldest son, fearing that there would be nothing left of the old family business for him to inherit, decided a new course needed to be taken. He said, "The buyer of the largest number of bullets are armies, but they don't buy ours. Since we make better bullets than anyone else, we should raise our own army and equip them with our bullets. We will defeat all other armies and we get far richer by waging war than by selling bullets." So, after a tearful farewell, the oldest son went off to war. In time, his letters became less upbeat about the excitement of leading a (small) army, and also less frequent. In time the letters stopped and he was never heard from again.
The youngest son had looked up to his brave, older brother, but was distraught by the path his decision to start an army had taken him. He thought long and hard about what to do, because if he did nothing his inheritance would also disappear.
Eventually he went to his father and said: "Father, while we still make a few elegant swords these days, they are for display in offices and homes. We learned that we needed to create other weapons if we were to remain prosperous. Now, bullets are cheap and plentiful and no one wants our creations. Instead of fighting with skilled swordsmen or marksmen, the armies fight as masses of people and don't need our precision bullets. We can build bigger bullets, I hear there is a new weapon called a cannon that needs especially expensive bullets, or we can again adapt. Since battles are now fought by armies, not small groups of Samurai. Let us add observation balloons to our bullet business, so that the leaders will now know what is happening during a battle."
The father agreed, and the family again became prosperous. In time their balloons became airplanes, to which they gave their name (Scawa turned into AWACS). And they were a lot more profitable selling AWACS than selling finely engineered, high performance cannon balls.
Posted at 03:09PM Jun 27, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[1]
Red shift, Blue shift, ...
All companies process raw materials to produce more valuable products that can be sold for a profit. Until recently, these raw materials where usually physical resources: iron ore, cotton fiber, coal, etc. With the onset of computers, it become practical to create companies that process information, as a valuable raw material, to produce valuable products. Google has figured out how to convert (indices of) information into advertising targets and thus into profits. Salesforce.com and eBay manage and broker information to make it more valuable to their customers. Banks and arbitrage firms take the raw data of markets and identify times to make acquisitions and when to sell. The ultimate version of this is the intelligence agencies (and newspapers), who take scraps of noisy data, process, and clean them up, identify relationships and produce extremely valuable insights, when they get it right.
On the otherhand, almost all companies use information technology to manage customer lists, payrolls, etc. In this case, information technology is part of the overhead.
When information is a raw material and processing improves value, increasing the cost/performance of IT improves the total profit proportionally to the size of the customers (at least). If it is part of the overhead, the impact is much less.
As a consequence, companies that produce information based (or redshift) products are driven to increase their IT infrastructures as rapidly and as cheaply as possible (scale means more value, reduced cost means more profit). Companies whose product is does not depend on information as a raw material (blue shift products) are less much less sensitive to IT cost; it is just overhead and the cost (and benefit) isn't multiplied by their number of customers.
An interesting question that remains is what sort of computations are done to "refine" information raw material. Most that I am aware of are embarrassingly parallel operations. These are the easiest (and safest) to scale up. But are there more communication and computationally intensive "refining" steps as well?
Posted at 02:01PM May 14, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Technology @ Sun 2007
I had the distinct honor of hosting the Technology Leadership Conference held at the Chaminade in Santa Cruz last week. About 150 of the technical leadership of the company attended the meeting, with nearly sixty providing posters describing some aspect of their work. It was fascinating to me, someone who is relatively new to Sun, to see so much innovation in one company. The invited talks gave us a great overview of some of the technological themes underway in the company, like vitualization and the SPARC roadmap, while others covered more technical issues like how magnetic tape works and how it compares to disk (it's not as far off as you might think). Perhaps most gratifying to me was the level of energy at the conference and the enthusiasm for Sun's technologies with which everyone left. If you weren't there, go talk to you local DE or fellow. I'll announce when we make some of the posters and slides from the conference available.
Posted at 07:06PM Apr 30, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[1]
Oldest Registered .COM Domains and where they are now
A number of people (Out of the Woodwork, Sun tied with IBM for 11th oldest .com domain name, and The 100 Oldest Registered .COMs) have already noted this web site with the 100 oldest currently registered .COM domains and noted that Sun was one of the first registered web sites, registered at the same time as IBM and before Intel and years before Cisco and Microsoft. What got my attention was the names the top of the list. The oldest registered .com domain, one full year before Sun and IBM was Symbolics, followed by BBN and Think.
Those names really take me back. BBN, of course, was one of the early contractors on the ARPANet. As a student I remember the excitement when the first "network interface" were rolled into MIT. That's one in the picture! Technology has really improved over the years. So it is not at all surprising that they were one of the very first to register a domain.
But its the symbolics.com and think.com that brought back the most memories. Symbolics was the Lisp Machine company that spun off from MIT. They built $80K workstations that were heavily used by the Artificial Intelligence community, but also by researchers in Vision and in the animation industry at the time. (They were about the same size and price as that BBN IMP we used as our Arpanet interface.) I remember being awed by the "render farm" of Symbolics machines at Pixar on a customer visit to Pixar, which was one of Symbolics' larger customers. Symbolics did their own animated film, Stanley and Stella in Breaking the Ice, by using the rendering jobs to burn in machines coming off the manufacturing line.
Symbolics' (Lisp implementation) of TCP/IP was the reference implementation when it came out. It was the first implemented and due to the debugging and development tools on the Lisp Machine, people had the most confidence in it in those early days. I remember discussions at Symbolics about Sun; how they didn't have any interesting technology, how buggy their networking code was, and how they could never survive. I believe Symbolics had a market cap about twice Sun's when it went public. At that time Symbolics was taping out their first custom microprocessor (Ivory) and was in development of of their second version (Sapphire), while Sun was just using commodity Motorola 68K's. And of course, Symbolics had the very advanced operating system developed for the Lisp Machine, while Sun was using Unix, which was just an inferior rehash of Multics. How wrong we were!
Somewhere in there, a grad student at MIT and I were involved in an evaluation of Symbolics' Lisp machine implementation and TI's (which also had a lot custom silicon). The two of us had a great time eating barbecue at the County Line in Austin and fantasizing about the super computers we could build by combining hundreds of these machines.
Well, that never happened, but the grad student was pretty successful. He did design some super computers (using Symbolics machines) at Thinking machines (think.com) before they also went out of business and he (Greg Papadopoulos, you probably guessed) came to Sun along with his friend Dave Douglas, Steve Heller and others.
A year ago I also joined Sun (and work for Greg). I think we all still believe in those same fantasies we shared overlooking the river Austin. You see glimpses of it in Greg's discussions about global computers and my ramblings on utility computing. The next few years are really going to be fun!
It's amazing how the circle closes.
Posted at 10:22AM Mar 06, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
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