This presentation provides an overview of the OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework. After a short introduction of the overall design, it explores the available APIs in kernel and userland. This includes standard interfaces (PKCS#11 - Public-Key Crypto Standard #11 from RSA Labs) but also additional interfaces to simplify the access to the cryptograhic services. In addition to the consumer APIs we'll also cover the administration of the cryptographic framework. This includes displaying, enabling/disabling or adding/removing certain cryptographic providers or mechanisms.

In his article on current trends in HPC, Chris Preimesberger sees parallels between NASA, whose technology gave rise to satellite television, Velcro, laser pointers and instant fruit drinks, and the HPC segment of IT, from which have sprung such innovations as high-performance disk drives, super-fast I/O channels, petabyte-capacity storage, deduplication, and virtualized servers and storage. He calls HPC the innovation engine of enterprise IT.

Makia Minich of the Lustre Users Group has prepared an online slide presentation on the Linux HPC Software Stack. The presentation outlines the project goals, which include developing an integrated software stack for Linux-based HPC solutions that is based on Sun HPC hardware and provides a complete set of tools and well-defined processes for configuring and provisioning an HPC cluster that is scalable and that includes tools for verification, management, administration and monitoring.

One of the speakers at the HPC Consortium held in mid-June in Dresden, Germany, was Ken Edgecomb of Canada's High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL), whose wide-ranging address covered everything from the rationale behind the move in the industry to Chip Multithreading (CMT), to the scaling capabilities of the Sun UltraSPARC T2 HPC cluster dubbed "Victoria Falls," to the cost of threads vs. hardware (and the cost per thread in such a server as the 5140), the changing research population at HPCVL, and the announcement that next year's HPC Consortium would take place in Kingston, Ontario.

Sun CTO for Storage and Data Management Practice Chris Wood gave a presentation on the company's Open Storage strategy during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 held this past week in Dresden, Germany. Visit the Sun Web site for the webcast.