Sun

There is a new resident in my home office. I´m jumpstarting fangorn at the moment. fangorn is a Sun Ultra 60 workstation (dual-proc UltraSPARC II system with 450 MHz on each proc and 1,5 GB memory). The Ultra60 line had it´s GA in 1998. This was shortly after my first contact with Sun systems. I purchased it for a few euros from a colleague to rescue it from his cellar and to have a multi-proc SPARC system for some testing. I think, fangorn is a good name for such an venerable system.

I should cook tea the whole day. I had an idea what we could do with all this threads in a 4 socket Victoria Falls system while waiting for the water to boil: Let´s build a poor mans fault tolerant system out of it. It´s an unrefined idea ...

Let´s assume you have to control something: For example a valve in a chemical plant. It´s an important valve, thus you can´t afford a fault (for example by cosmic rays flipping a bit). Thus it´s a common method to compute something multiple times and compare the result. Two computations isn´t enough. When the results differ, you can´t tell what result is the right one. Or better: What´s the result with the highes probability to be correct. The practice suggests to compute it three times and to compare it afterwarts. The result with at least two votes of three in this quorum wins.

You could implement every decision making instance in an LDOM. Thus you could even implement different operating system patch levels in each of the systems.

And this fits with the four procs of a fully blown Victoria Falls system . Three procs for computations and one procs for the comparator. To ensure that every process runs on the same core it was tested, you could bind it to a processor.

This would reduce the thread count to 64 effective processors, but you have implemented a poor-mans fault-tolerant system (poor man because of no hardware lockstepping, it would be just application lockstepping) and well, you have more than enough hardware threads in a Victoria Falls system ...

I will think a little bit more about it in the next few days....

On August 15th the support for Solaris 7 has ceased (besides of special agreements) . This is 10 years after the intoduction of Solaris 7 in 1998.

I started this afternoon to write the Kerberos tutorial for the LKSF series. I´ve just put the first fragments in the public and will update them regulary. You can find them here. I will integrate them to the LKSF book as soon i´ve finalized it, but this will take really long time. I didn´t even started decribing the Solaris implementation so far. Kerberos is such a vast topic ...

They are somewhat similar, but at the end both represent really different concepts of building a server: Sun announced today the Sun Fire X2250 and the Sun Fire X4250. Both systems are systems in the 2-socket server class, but besides this fact the system are really different.

Sun Fire X2250 Server

The Sun Fire X2250 is a 2 socket XEON system in one rack unit. It can provide room up to 2 disks. It was primarily developed for HPC deployments as a cheap compute node or for highly budget sensitive customers. By the way: It provides an ILOM interface, it´s not equipped with the ELOM.

Sun Fire X4250 Server

The Sun Fire X4250 is a two rack unit, dual socket system. The additional rack unit was used in an efficient manner. You can plug up to 16 SAS harddisks into this chassis. At this moment this leads to a total capacity of almost 2.3 TB raw disk capacity. So it´s the Xeon based brother to the Opteron based X4240. The website specifies it´s an ELOM system, but docs.sun.com already contains the documentation for the X4250 with ILOM.

There are many people, who don´t like the eLOM of our Intel based x86 servers and want the iLOM of the Opteron servers instead. The cure is near: The eLOM to iLOM migration guide already appeared at docs.sun.com

Good news from the benchmarking department - Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server Is Industry's Fastest x86 Java Server:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the new SPECjbb2005 world record score, which beats all other x86 systems on the market. The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, equipped with eight Quad-Core AMD Opteron model 8360SE processors and running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), posted an x86 World Record score of 683,542 SPECjbb2005 bops (85,443 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM).

You will find further information at the X4600 Benchmarks page. Matches my impression that the X4600 is one of the big hits from Andy and his teams.

Ich habe mal die Liste der Termine in der linken Seitenleiste aufgefrischt. Ich bitte um freundliche Beachtung.

Was hat die Zubereitung von Rouladen mit Chip Multi Threading zu tun? Sehr viel ...


PS: Das Video ist auch schon beim Indiskretion Ehrensache Blog angekommen:

Andererseit: Ich mag Unternehmen, die genau das wagen. Einfach mal was probieren. Auch auf die Gefahr, dass es schief geht.

Und deshalb: Hut ab vor Sun Microsystems und ihrem Kochstudio.

Oracle and CMT are often a natural choice. Whenever you have many parallel requests and the latency isn´t a key performance indicator, you should give it a try. But sometimes there are loads, that should scale well on CMT systems but they don´t scale well. In most cases there are some quirks in the SQL statements that makes the code single- or few-threaded. Glenn Fawcett summarized some great tips for Oracle and CMT in a series of blog articles to overcome such problems.

(via: Stefan Hinker)

Yesterday i visted a customer with severe space problems. You think: "Hey, my datacenter is full, too. Not a big deal". But those folks have really no space for euquipment, to be exact ... they have negative space for new equipment ... when they remove one or two systems the datacenter is absolutly full I thought at first, the people of the customer had a "paint it black" day when they talked about it at first ... but i have to admit, that they even vastly understated the problem. This challenge will be a hard nut to crack .... but is solvable .. i have already some ideas. Sometimes it´s a good thing to work for a technology company, because some problem must be solved by technology. And can be only solved by technology.

There is some discussion in the media about the consequences of the ruling in the Novell vs. SCO lawsuit. Some media outlets like Inquirer think this may pose a problem. I think, this reports are the usual "only bad news are good news". IMHO nothing like that will happen. Opensolaris is an established member of the open source community. Novell has a business relying on open source. Trying to use this copyright to take out a competitor or trying got get a large heap of money would totally ruin a reputation in a core market that already got some scars by the Microsoft/Novell deal. This would be basically a second edition of the SCO/IBM lawsuit ... and you know what happened to the unix business of SCO. And besides of this ... normal companies don´t sue each other, as this can lead to a mutually assured destruction thing too fast ...

BTW: In my personal opinion the industry should end this topic for one and all times and put the old unix source code into the public domain ...

Looks like our quarter wasn´t that bad as many analysts and investors expected. Reuters reports in Sun Micro shares up on preliminary earnings:

Sun, the world's fourth largest business computer maker, said it expects fourth quarter net income of 5 cents to 15 cents per share, including a $100 million restructuring charge.[...]Sun on Tuesday also said it expects to post fourth quarter revenues ranging from $3.73 billion to $3.8 billion, as compared with $3.835 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. [...] Excluding items, Sun expects to report earnings per diluted share ranging from 25 cents to 35 cents.

In after-hour trading, the SUNW stock rised to $9.88 (or 12.12%).

There are some interesting benchmark numbers in the press release from Sun about the new SPARC Enterprise M9000 with 64 SPARC VII ("Jupiter") processors:

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running Solaris 10 OS, the SAP ERP application Release 6.0 and Oracle Database 10g achieved a world record result on the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark by achieving 39,100 SD Benchmark users. The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server result beats the IBM Power 595 POWER6 server with 35,400 SD Benchmark users by 10.5% and outperforms the HP Integrity Superdome SD64B with 30,000 SD Benchmark users by 30.3%,[...mabushi deleted...].[1]

In addition to that, Sun announces some impressive numbers for the LINPACK benchmark. 2 Teraflops in a single operating system image

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, based on SPARC64 VII processors, and using Sun Studio 12 software with Solaris 10 OS delivers a score of 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack's Highly Parallel Computing benchmark. The SPARC Enterprise M9000 outperforms the IBM Power 595 POWER6 by nearly 2X and beats the HP Integrity Superdome system by 2.7X.[2]

This is interesting for computing jobs in need of a large single system image with short ways to to the memory. (No, the SGI Altix isn´t a competition for that ... single image too, but completely different architecture). Not all jobs scales on a cluster machine

Today we have announced the 1 TB tape drive: Sun Microsystems Announces World's First One Terabyte Tape Storage Drive. The the T10000B delivers 120 MB/sec throughput with 1 TB native. The next competitor (LTO4) has 800 GB native.The only disadvantage: This tape drives are enterprise hardware and build to last ... so the pricetag is $37.000. So don´t wait for it as you backup solution at home.