Posts by Daniel Chapiesky 8 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2008
The damn rocket and gantry looks like a rendered image badly photoshoped... is it just me?
First photo in distance.... the mercury vapor lights are difuse as in a real photo... the glare off the rocket is crisp and you can read the lettering...
Second photo... again... the light in the window at the lower right is over exposed but the rocket appears crisp and clean... even ... uh... rendered....
So... the big idea is to let "managed" code (which ostensibly is "more" secure) have pure unfettered access to the existing code base of "COM" (read COMpletely unsecure) and that is somehow extremely cooooooool.
Or...
Let's add YAL ("Yet Another Layer") of which there is a public API given to developers, an internal API for Microsoft Application Developers to take advantage of, and an ever changing base which this YAL sits precariously on top of. Oh yeah... BTW... Dynamic languages inherently have aspects associated with their objects which do not transpose easily with the Windows internals... So your YAL is already hobbled. Waste more of our time Microsoft!
Bleh.
I've got sun's, ibm's, hp's & no name's. If I had the budget I'd drop everything except for the sun's. Why...? Consistency. Solaris/OpenSolaris on the smallest to the largest. Stable releases and containers for testing. Oh... and someone to sue....
Yeah I said it. Sue.
When it comes down to it the lawyers in your company drive many decisions which your CIO is told to implement. I love linux and it has its place. I hate windows and it still has its place too. Why do companies with millions of dollars of revenue use windows and solaris... We can sue the hell out of the companies that make them.
Does that mean we will? Does that mean we can, in actuallity? No. But we can say to our stock holders that liability and exposure are minimized by going with these vendors.
The T5440 is clearly a compute server. It also appears to be a swiss army knife waiting to be outfitted with the tools you want since it has 8 pci slots... Do you want a visualization server? Throw 256 gigs of ram in it and 4 video cards.... now you can drive monstrous displays with ONE BOX.
Do you want a storage virtualization server.... throw 256 gigs of ram in it, 6 dual channel FC cards, 2 8 port 1gigE cards or 2 10gigE faceplates.... and you got a kick ass storage virtualization server.
Do you want a web server from hell? Do the above with forward facing and rear facing gigabit cards.
Oracle pricing? screw oracle. Stored procedures is the only reason anyone stays with oracle. Rewriting them for mysql is a bitch and no one wanted to do that because until recently mysql was impossible to sue if someone screwed up.
Sun guys? Listening? You got mysql now. Your customer's lawyers will now give a go ahead on using mysql because of it. You guys write an Oracle to mySQL stored procedure converter... and you can throw down cost savings across the board for your customers.
For God's sake.. don't let your server sales people kill that idea cause it would effect oracle server sales which they may get a cut of... No in-fighting.
Anyway.... The T5440 is a bad-ass box and I think it really is just a prelude to rock and T3.... for working out the chassis/cooling/power etc...
I am not a Sun employee but I's got's a bunch of 'em.
I am a linux kernel hacker and have C++ in my kernel... do you?
I am a windows programmer... and I still use visual studio 7 cause .NET sucks.
And finally... I pay the bills and own everything. Business is first and always first.
The article states that:
"The Sparc T2+ chips have a floating point math unit for each core, plus an on-chip cryptographic processor and 4MB of L2 cache that is shared by the cores."
This is essentially an understatement... Each core has it's own dedicated cryptographic processor which means 8 crypto-processors per T2+ and 16 for the whole server described.
The 4 Megabytes of cache "shared by the cores" is also something of an understatement because there is a cross-bar between the L1 cache of each core and the 8 separate L2 cache banks. The cross-bar is far more quick and efficient allowing threads to jump from core to core without having cache flushes. Finally, each core's L2 cache talks directly to it's own memory controller which in turn talks to it's own dedicated DIMM slots. In effect you have 8 ultrasparc computers each with a single core that has 8 simultaneous threads and it's _own_ crypto processor, L1/L2 caches & DIMM memory.
This server throws down 32 of the above into a 4U box and up to 512GB of memory.
HELL YES.
http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/datasheet.pdf
Daniel Chapiesky
The comment AnonymousCoward quoted was totally out of context and does not tell the whole story... see:
http://planets.sun.com/ISVe/group/ISVE/
"As T5440 is a NUMA architecture, memory latency should be considered when running database applications that are very sensitive to memery latency. Fortunately, the threaded design of UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip acts to minimize the impact of memory latency. DB2 also supports the optimal placement of a database partition's processes and memory, which means a database partition's processes and memory can be restricted to an Locality Group (lgroup), so there are lower memory latencies and increased performance."
Your not going run oracle on one these boxes... They have no local storage beyong 4 disks and you can't even get a good raid array with that many. They do have 8 pci slots and 2 10gigE ports along with 128GB for about $140K.... Load the thing up with network cards and it can be the web server/light thread server from hell....
factor in the power and cooling needed for 14 dual xeons to compete with this box and the TCO drops enormously.
The whiners about oracle licensing should get 1400 ipods and shut up.... The TCO of oracle is separate from this sun server and staying on an older box because of oracle licensing means your IT department can't support your applications and has no idea about what TCO means... It includes disaster recovery, support salaries, and little things like points of failure which increase exponentially with each linux server you add.
Give me four of these sun servers and I can replace 4 RACKS of equipment and fire the 2 slack employees that I would otherwise need to install the latest ubuntu pack, which BTW breaks our applications everytime there is a version upgrade.
IN ADDITION.... get your sorry asses off apache and go to haproxy/nginx/& yaws.... NICE THIN THREADS THERE and the T2 with partitioning will stomp anything you throw at it.
God I hate people who think they know what TCO is...
Transactional Memory would save Windoze.....
The reason gates was pushing intel for faster and faster processors was windoze fails miserably at being multi-threaded.
Again try to not sieze up....
Yes applications can thread. The OS core however is a mismash of backward compatible crap that relies on wrapper after wrapper after wrapper API.
Let's say I have twenty badly written modules which don't thread very well but all must syncronize on a particular variable. Or perhaps I have an incredibly inadequate process scheduler that doesn't scale worth a damn past two cores....
If you don't believe me, then look at all the virtualization crap MS is pushing. You will never see windoze process monitor display 128 CPUs.... a "ps" on a sun T2+ does that easily...
I need backward compatibility but need scaling that doesn't break that compability. Transactional Memory puts the syncronization at the hardware level so a substantial amount of code just needs to be recompiled, not rewritten. This is not a problem with windoze cause a 300 megabyte service pack isn't scaring people as much as it used to.
So I predict, baring patent infringement, Intel will soon be touting "Hyper Transactional Memory" WOOOOOOOOO!
Let the flames begin....
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