Posts by No Use for A Name

Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle wall of secrecy

oracle's sun pr is a desaster!

oracle's pr with respect to sun is a major deaster no less. they let the uncertainty about solaris/opensolaris (and to some extend sparc) just grow and grow, the fudsters are having a field day.

we had a rep in recently and he was very reassuring and presented nda'd material that was promising. I asked him why they just not release that stuff in public and he doesn't understand either. even with this info our cto is taking a wait and see stance until oracle talks openly and markets and investors see that they are committed.

it will be expensive to fix this pr mess and regain the markets trust. good job oracle.

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

well there is also mythryl

...for the linux uber-nerd crew suffering the functional itch and wanting to be part of a new and emerging parole stemming from the ml/ocaml branch: http://mythryl.org/

Oracle and Sun fingered for Sidekick fiasco

a new low

...in the ongoing decline of the reg! ms/danger didn't follow standard protocol in data-center managment, fell on their noses in public and now sun/oracle is to blame...?! an article based on a job posting and some uneducated guesses. man you can do better than this!

total fud and I learned nothing here, except that the reg is willing to compromise everything for a few clicks and comments.

Sun goes over Rainbow Falls

8 not 16 threads

see here: : http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/presentations/hotchips/rf.pdf

not sure where this number comes from. each t3 will support 128 threads. also clockspeed is going to be ‘conservative'.

Sun killing 'Rock' Sparc chip?

isca 2009

anybody know if the isca presentation on rock went down as scheduled this wedensday?

http://isca09.cs.columbia.edu/papers.html

sun just scheduled rock demos in hamburg

this is weird - sun just scheduled a presentation of rock in hamburg, supposedly live hardware will be demoed:

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5643-preHHOSUG-ROCK-NDA-Praesentation.html

also there is the presentation at isca next week:

"Simultaneous Speculative Threading: A Novel Pipeline Architecture Implemented in Sun's ROCK Processor"

See: http://isca09.cs.columbia.edu/papers.html

I doubt that the last word is spoken on this.

OpenSolaris ported to ARM chips

this is good news - albeit

...a year to late. an zfs-nas box would be killer and is what I am waiting for. but the nas market already has matured and opensolaris is a little late. hopefully somebody sees an opportunity and makes it happen. and with crossbow one could build a cool router/nas with lots of finegrained control...

Apple takes Snow Leopard for walk

zfs missing

serious disappointment!! not a word about it! hfs+ is really long over its peak and zfs would offer features to be had nowhere else. wonder what happened. maybe its coming in 10.7...

IBM ships SSDs for Power Systems

zfs

the article mentions sun's cheaper offering as well as ibm's 'data balancer' but neglects to explain that the zfs filesystem in solaris does exactly what the data balancer does: use the sdd tas a clever cache by moving frequently used datasets onto it.

check the benchmarks, zfs is pretty good at this and does it automatically already. its also waaaaay cheaper than aix and let's you use commodity sdd's.

and then there is dtrace...

Massed x86 ranks 'blowing away' supercomputer monoliths

wtf - some dell add for free?!

everybody and their mama have been doing x86 clusters in hpc for ages: sun, ibm, hp, sgi and whatnot. this is not news and certainly not worth 3 pages.

What if IBM doesn't buy Sun?

bad timing

surely the rumors did a lot of damage just as the public opinion on sun brightened a bit with their recent products, fishworks in particular. also quite some excitement about opensolaris in the shops I deal with. but ever since the rumor dropped nobody is willing to take any chance with sun, even though their kit is nice and their software impresses. to bad.

last not least I really was looking forward to see rock, tukwila and power7 shootouts this winter...

HP iron still haunted by ghost of Compaq

some icd numbers acutally help

somebody should have read the latest icd report before writing this article: "Sun was the only top 5 server vendor to experience positive x86 server revenue growth in the quarter – growing factory revenue 21.3% – and gaining x86 market share in the process."

and with respect to blades: "Sun, Dell, and Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens all significantly outperformed the market with year-over-year revenue growth of more than 60% respectively."

also last time I looked hp-ux wasn't exactly the cradle of innovation, much less creating any developer excitement.

it's interesting times with tukwila and 2 new sparc chips coming this year. power7 is also around the corner.

Sun christens once and future Supernovas

all that sun fud is getting silly

ever since ashley vance left for nyt the reg's reporting on sun has been going downhill. gone are those well researched and thoughtful pieces on sun; obviously benefiting by some good inside sources in the company.

and now?! when it comes to sun it's just the usual hack-job of an article, pulling together some bits and pieces that showed up elsewhere and taps into the current meme of 'sun is the new dec'...

and don't even get me started on the commenters here!

it's pretty laughable imho. while sun's numbers aren't looking to good its a pretty solid company actually creating revenue and whats more important their product folio looks well positioned given the challenges coming up. governments are beginning to pour tons of money into IT and they require open source for various reasons.

last not least - as someone who works in a shop that bought a couple of 5120/40's recently we are quite happy with our machines. we have been informally briefed on supernova by our rep and I'd say this looks like a solid offering. everybody I know in sparc-land holds of on new purchases until these come to market.

sun may well be the new apple: predicted dead over and over. I'd say wait and see.

Sun boosts OpenSolaris on Atom

cool - now I want a zfs-enabled nas

this is good news. now somebody needs to put together a nice little 4 bay nas running opensolaris and zfs by default. make it torrent-competent and have some media-server run on it an it will be killa!

Sun's Niagara 3 will have 16-cores and 16 threads per core

@AC

coming from a legacy 5000+ seats microsoft installation we evaluated linux vs. opensolaris. decision has yet to be made but opensolaris has come out very attractive, not least because of the security model and integration with id-management products sun offers.

we would get support for os, openoffice and mysql from one vendor. being able to run linux software with little to no modification is also a big plus. we liked zfs for our storage-requirements but there are some headaches with older storage solutions we still have to keep around.

what sucks is the lack of drivers for commodity hardware, missing package system and open office still has ways to go to be as easy to use as office.

I hope sun manages to ride out the current slump. looking at the way both markets and regulation (!) is heading they really do offer a very consistent software & support strategy, they are just a little to much ahead of time...

hp-ux indeed is a joke for the majority of markets. proprietary software and hardware lock-in - that is so 1992! and then the regulation nightmare when you deal with public clients on a large scale.

and one more word on niagara - if you look at the berkeley paper you'll see that in this application the cell beats the niagara by 2x, but then it runs at 3.2ghz versus 1.4ghz on the niagara. I really start to wonder what a 2.1ghz niagara would do.

btw - ours run at 1.2ghz and we are perfectly happy with the performance.

@HPC tasks

this is not my expertise but sun apparently has sold a cluster to the high performance computing virtual laboratory in canada: http://blogs.sun.com/HPC/entry/hpcvl_turns_to_cmt_for

I am also aware of at least one german university evaluating a t2 cluster right now.

uc berkeley recently had a paper comparing matrix-vector multiplication on x86, niagara and cell. the results where surprisingly good for niagara: 'astoundingly, the full system single socket (64thread) median results achieve 3GFlop/s, more than 3 the performance of a single socket of the 86machines.'

http://cscads.rice.edu/publications/paper19

cell of course beat the crap out of niagara too. anyhow - all that talk about niagara being slow is just plain bs. given the right application those machines deliver very good performance at low power consumption. and in few years time we will see x86 processors using the very same model that sun uses for t2 - simple, relatively slow in-order cores amassed on one chip. of course since intel is doing it then everybody will brag about how cool it is...

lots of sun-bashing

...as always on the reg. pitty they might financially underperform right now - and who doesn't in this market - but they certainly are among the most innovative companies around.

if the will be able to monetize their products remains to be seen, but I must say we are very happy with our t2 boxen - and we came from x86! solaris too has been a pleasant surprise so far. just wish they get their act together on open office and we probably would move the whole institution front-office to back office to sun hard/software.

and jeremy - last time I checked solaris was open sourced and running on intel just fine - like on my macbook pro here...