Both Sun and Fujitsu shared their plans for next-generation SPARC at the recent "Hot Chips" conference. Fujitsu is working on an eight-core SPARC64 Chip and Sun is working on the 16-core ROCK CMT Processor.
BM Seer blogs yet again on his favorite subject, the record setting results racked up by Sun products in benchmarking exercises. This time he writes about the Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 Opteron 2.5 Ghz QC) running Sun Java SE 6 Update 6-p, which achieved a result of 683542 SPECjbb2005 bops, 85443 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM for the best score for all x86 based servers on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark.
Fujitsu’s Takumi Maruyama delivered a presentation on Tuesday at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif. According to a report in Computerworld, at the end of that presentation there was a brief discussion of a future eight-core version of the quad-core SPARC64 VII. The eight core chip has a code name of “Venus”. Sun and Fujitsu jointly developed the SPARC Enterprise server line that uses the SPARC64 chips and Solaris 10.
A 64-way SPARC Enterprise M9000 equipped with quad-core 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark.
Maruyama provided few details, including when the processor will ship other than it will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core SPARC64 VII.
Sun's Shailender Chaudhry delivered a presentation at the August 2008 "Hot Chips" conference.
Slides from the talk, "Rock: A third Generation 65nm, 16-Core, 32 Thread + 32 Scout-Threads CMT SPARC Processor" are
available on-line in PDF format.
"The goals for this high-end commercial microprocessor are high
throughput and high single-thread performance, mainframe-class
reliability, hardware transactional memory, and linear scalability.
We show how these goals are met by the logical and physical design
of this 2.3GHz 396mm2 16-core 32-thread plus 32-scout-thread
microprocessor."
Coming from the same roots, Solaris and Linux are complementary and a natural fit to work together. With Solaris Containers for Linux Applications you can run Linux applications unmodified on x86 Solaris servers. The Solaris Operating System is an ideal platform for today's heterogeneous compute environments.
For customer who choose Linux, Sun has a very competitive set of hardware, software and service options.
Angus MacDonald, chief technologist for Sun Microsystems, Australasia, has put together a slide presentation that he calls "The Future of the Eco-Datacenter," which investigates the increasingly pressing conjunction of ecology and economy as it affects the datacenter. He talks about the tension between demand and capacity and ways around these conflicts, such as increasing utilization, improving space efficiency and cutting energy costs.
In a recent InfoWorld posting, Zack Urlocker interviewed Scott McNealy, though much of the two-part article deals with the role at Sun of Andy Bechtolsheim.
Selling, selling, selling (to paraphrase the real estate industry) is paramount in McNealy's view of every executive's job. "I don’t know anything that you do that doesn’t require selling," he contends. And this extends even to recruiting the best people to your company, he continues.
Selling calls for travel, McNealy added, noting his more than 150,000 airline miles that he logs every year on behalf of Sun.
When Rich Green, Sun EVP for software, sat down for an interview with Al Riske, he demonstrated two attributes the writer says he is noted for: congeniality and impatience. Both were in evidence as the pair discussed the open source marketing strategy at Sun. Looking into the activities of Green and his team, Riske discovered that, as he writes, they "...aren't simply throwing source code over the wall and waiting for good things to happen."
An OpenSolaris ARC (architecture board) proposal to support booting Solaris from iSCSI has been approved as PSARC/2008/427. The problem was that Solaris was unable to be boot-off from iSCSI disk. This is a drawback which limits Solaris' competency in iSCSI SAN enviroment, diskless clients.
"MySQL Workbench: A Data Modeling Guide for Developers and DBAs" looks at the various types of data modern businesses need to manage, examines the reasons why a model-driven approach to data management is necessary, and outlines the benefits such an approach provides. It also highlights how the MySQL Workbench product from MySQL can be an indispensable aid in the hands of experienced data modelers, developers, and DBAs who are tasked with managing the complex data management infrastructure of a dynamic and growing business.
MySQL Enterprise Monitor provides you with the following benefits:
Get a consolidated view into the health of all your MySQL servers
Monitor over 600 MySQL and operating system variables with the Enterprise Dashboard
Monitor MySQL sessions, connections, replication latency and more with 20+ graphs
Gain immediate visibility into your replication topologies through auto detection and grouping
View real time master/slave performance using the MySQL Replication Monitor
Customize the MySQL Enterprise Monitor for your specific needs using customization options
Get notified of issues before they become costly outages using threshold driven alerts
The white paper "MySQL Enterprise Monitor: A Technical Overview" provides a comprehensive functional and technical overview of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and the distributed, web-based application that is used to service the comprehensive feature set. The MySQL Enterprise Monitor proactively monitors enterprise MySQL database environments and provides expert advice on how enterprise customers can tighten security and optimize the performance and uptime of their MySQL powered systems.
Sun has released the Sun Streaming Software Release 2 (AKA v2.0) and Transitioning Sun Streaming Software v1.8. By using the Capacity-On-Demand pricing model, Sun allows customers to purchase a lower streaming capacity at a lowered price, providing a lower entry price point for the system.
The Sun Streaming System delivers quick-to-market, personalized video services on the most reliable, efficient, and scalable IPTV platform available. Sun's flexible x64 portfolio of servers and storage systems lets you enter emerging markets at a low cost for first-subscriber roll-outs and rapidly scale as subscribers and services grow. Deployed as edge servers, or as a centralized or hybrid networking model, the Sun Streaming System gives you video caching, streaming, and optical transport – all in an integrated IP streaming system.
Sun has released Sun Grid Engine 6.2, the Distributed Resource Management software that provides customers with interoperability capability with an open source project (Grid Engine Open Source) as well as superb, rock solid support for the integrated solution from Sun for all existing hardware and software investments because of binary compatibility for investment protection. Sun Grid Engine leverages all other hardware and operating systems regardless of manufacturers and does not lock them in.
Leveraging two years of open source development, Sun OpenDS SE 1.0 -- Sun's first commercial Directory Services offering based on the open source OpenDS Directory Services Project -- is a full Sun-licensed product with support offering including a subscription model and a first-time support offering for this next-generational set of Directory Services.
Roger Meike, Sun Labs Director, introduces viewers to the Sun SPOT in a brief video that considers the variety of components in the device (3-D accelerometer, temperature and light sensors) programmed in Java, powered by its own battery and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
The 2008-2009 Sun Tech Days World Tour will kick off in September in São Paulo, Brazil. The Tech Days Tour will bring educational opportunities to 13 cities. It's an opportunity for those who develop in Java, Scripting, MySQL, on OpenSolaris, with NetBeans or RIA's. This conference features expert speakers and will provide opportunities learn, to network, to find peers in your community.
Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager connects users of Sun Ray clients to Windows virtual machines via the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). It provides a Sun Ray kiosk session that allows users to connect to their virtual machines. The kiosk session prompts the user for their Active Directory user name and password. Then the user is shown a list of available desktops, or is logged directly into the desktop if there is only one available.
"Towards Cloud Computing with Sun Grid Engine 6.2" is a podcast in which Sun Product Line Manager Miha Ahronovitz interviews Sun Grid Architect Daniel Templeton. The result is a clarification of the scope and meaning of cloud computing and a demonstration of how easy it is to get started with Sun Grid Engine 6.2.
Aaron Dubrow reports on the work of Rob Farber and Harold Trease, both with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), using Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to demonstrate the ability to create searchable databases based on image recognition with massive amounts of data rather than text tagging.
BM Seer reports in his blog on benchmarking results that pitted the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220/T5240 against the IBM Cell Broadband Engine in a pattern matching operation. For this benchmark, both IBM and Sun used the Aho-Corasick algorithm for string searching.
The Sun white paper "Sun Fire X4150, X4250 and X4450 Server Architecture: Breakthrough Density Using Sun and Intel Technology" explains how Sun, in response to the increasing pressure being applied to IT departments to deliver new services and satisfy escalating resource demands for new applications and users, has introduced the Sun Fire X4150, X4250, and X4450 servers, which offer incredible system density, with robust compute, memory, networking, storage, and I/O expansion in small, compact 1U and 2U form factors.
Martin MC Brown blogs his experience with the Sun X4150 on computer world describing his experience as long term test.
"My test unit has two quad core Xeon CPUs, 16GB of RAM and four 76GB SAS drives, and it saps about the same amount of power as a T1000, that is, in terms of the electrical power required to run the machine. But it is, in fact, a significantly more capable machine in some respects, albeit for a different target audience and range of applications." Brown Said in his blog.
The StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Prime (VTL Prime) System is an addition to the VTL product portfolio, and the first data de-duplication solution from Sun. VTL Prime provides a way to synchronize and consolidate the backup process for remote-office and large enterprise environments.
ZFS is commonly used for local I/O in a Solaris-based platform. The architecture can support very large amounts of storage and is considered easy to administrate. while focusing on data integrity, every block is check-summed to prevent silent data corruption.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important.
The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 126 Issue 3, were:
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software as a Service [20382]
In a BigAdmin Sun document, Ryan Pratt writes how the "Sun Fire X4500 Server can deliver massive storage capacity and remarkable throughput, making it well-suited as a nearline storage platform for backup and restore applications. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 and the CommVault Simpana Suite suit the Sun Fire X4500 Server for streamlining and improving backup and restore operations."
OpenDS is an open-source, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory-server project that is written entirely in the Java programming language. The project, which just shipped its release 1.0.0, is gaining momentum with an ever-growing community of committers, contributors, and users.
Mazen Arakji and Ludovic Poitou wrote an article explaining how to install and configure OpenDS as a naming service for UNIX clients that run OpenSolaris Operating System. The procedures in this series also apply to the Solaris 10 OS. Part 2 will steps you through the advanced configurations: setting up the directory service for UNIX user authentication, configuring for Digest-MD5 or CRAM-MD5 authentication, configuring clients, and so forth.UNIX user authentication, configuring for Digest-MD5 or CRAM-MD5 authentication, configuring clients, and so forth
"Image Packaging System Best Practices" provides the latest information on adopting the open source Image Packaging System (IPS) in support of multi-OS platform binary software distributions. Projects delivering IPS packages for the OpenSolaris environment are encouraged to consult the "Getting Started with Image Packaging System" information on OpenSolaris.com.
Joerg Moellenkamp writes, "How can you prevent the subtle variances between your systems? The most obvious way is the automation of the installation. Let do the computer, what a computer can do at best: Repetitive tasks with the same quality over and over again. Jumpstart and Jet have several ways and means to do an automatic installation, thus making the live of the admin much easier after you've done the initial setup. And in this tutorial I want to show you that this setup is really easy."
As part of his on going series, "Less Known Solaris Features", Joerg explains how to do that with Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit (JET).
Sun Netra X4250
Built to the demanding specifications of NEBS Level 3 certification and ETSI
Sun has expanded its Netra 2RU product line with the Netra X4250, a two-socket, carrier-grade x64 servers powered by high performance, low-power Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors. This carrier-grade system features double the memory found in systems of the same class, and it can expand up to a 8-way configuration, all in a compact 20-inch deep 2U-footprint, making it ideal for next-generation networks.
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