Two recently released reports from Gartner Inc. report on the benefits of the Sun/Dell OEM agreement for the two companies [19028] and worldwide server sales for the third quarter of 2007 [19047].
If High Performance Computing is of interest, Sun CTO and EVP of Research and Development Greg Papadopoulos offers his views on Sun's direction in the massive-scale computing market [19012] and there is an interesting webcast, less than 15 minutes long, on parallelizing applications [19049]. Also check out the latest developments on Sun's new HPC Community Portal [19050] and the latest update on TACC's Ranger, which is expected to be online in early December [18991].
In the free and open source market, learn more about OpenxVM - a community hub for open source projects related to virtualization software and data center automation tools [18998]. There is now a free service available to open source Java developers that finds defects in applications [19015]. MIT Press has a new book considered the most comprehensive on OpenMP API's parallel programming [18984].
New Sun server products include:
Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server support for the quad-core AMD Opteron Model 2347 processor [18802]
New Intel and AMD Opteron processors for Sun Blade X6250, X6220 Server Modules and 6000 Modular System [18808 ]
36TB and 48TB standard configurations for Sun Fire X4500 [18971]
Plus, don't miss the Software and SysAdmin sections also included in this week's edition.
The Sun Upgrade Advantage Program (UAP) is offering double trade-in value for Sun Enterprise E6500, E10000, and Sun Fire F6800, F12K, and F15K when upgrading to Sun SPARC Enterprise M Series Systems. This special offer expires March 30, 2008.
Sun is offering a special training offer for individuals wanting to make the most of their holidays by gifting themselves with training to advance their careers. Train with Sun during select holiday weeks and receive a free $200 Best Buy card and a Web-based course equivalent.
Gartner Inc. Senior Research Analyst Errol Rasit sees the Sun/Dell multi-year distribution agreement announced last month as one that is helping Sun solidify its Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) in the x86 market.
New research from Gartner Inc. shows worldwide server revenue totaled $13.4 billion during the third quarter of 2007, a 2.6 percent increase year over year. Sun experienced positive server sales in the third quarter of 2007 with an 11.4 percent growth in revenue.
Darryl Gove in compiler performance engineering at Sun has delivered an excellent Sun "Hot Topics" webcast, covering parallelizing applications. Specific topics include parallelizing using Pthreads (POSIX threads) and OpenMP, auto-parallelization by the compiler, profiling parallel applications, and detecting data races using the thread analyzer.
The Sun HPC Community Portal, which was launched in mid-November, is a member-based community for Sun HPC users to engage with Sun engineers, partners, and a generalized peer group in sharing information and collaborating on HPC topics.
SNI Editor-in-Chief/CTO John J. McLaughlin posts items of interest to Sun Users on a
regular basis on his blog. A quick recap of John's posts for the last week include: Windows, GNU/Linux grow while Unix stays flat (but undefeated), Multi-threading for Developers - A Webcast, and Presentations from Sun HPC Consortium 2007.
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System News, Inc. (SNI), has been publishing a daily blog for the last few months. We see the blog as a complement to the weekly news summary. Some short blog entries may be expanded by the the SNI writers into longer stories that are published in the weekly issue.
We have added a new feature to the web site - which we sometimes refer to as a newa portal. At the bottom of the center "content" column, we have two boxes. One lists the ten most popular articles of the current issue. The other lists the 10 most recent blogs.systemnews.com blog entries. 10 - 20 entries week, posted dailiy.
System News, Inc. (SNI) offers sponsored versions of the "System News for Sun Users" newsletter to Sun Resellers. Resellers can offer subscriptions to their customers and prospects. The sponsored newsletter will have the Reseller's Brand and will be integrated into the Reseller's Web site.
The purpose of a sponsored version of the newsletter is to drive the sale of Sun products.
If anyone at Sun Microsystems knows the company's direction in the massive-scale computing market, it would be Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and executive VP of Research and Development. That's why HPCwire chose him to query in an interview that focuses on such issues as standard instruction set architectures, "Redshift," the status of the Proximity Communications research, and the significance of Sun's new Constellation System supercomputer.
The Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) is the subject of Josh Simon's blog, where he reports on the comments made by TACC Director Jay Boisseau at the HPC Consortium in Reno. TACC's Ranger is expected to be online by early December.
Sun's Network.com is evolving into a "virtual on-demand datacenter" for developers in the view of Chris Gonsalves, whose article outlines the tools and applications available on the web site. Gonsalves writes that the site's contents illustrate the distance Sun has come in meeting the utility computing demands of the developer community.
Art Wittmann of Network Computing recently took a hard look at Sun's performance and reported mixed feelings. Yes, Sun has had four profitable quarters in a row but that improvement results, in his view, from efficiencies rather than sales growth. In the long run he suspects that this alone won't be enough for Sun to recapture its former prominence. Wittmann put some questions to Sun Executive VP John Fowler in an effort to learn whether Sun would rise again.
The latest update to the Sun Secure Global Desktop (SGD) is version 4.40, which is available from the Sun Download Center. There are multiple new features in this update to the Sun software that provides secure access to centralized Windows, UNIX, Mainframe and Midrange applications from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows PCs, Solaris OS Workstations, thin clients and mobile devices.
Until it is the case that the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) adjusts automatically to changes in memory size, CPU configuration and I/O load, Jim Laurent suggests that users familiarize themselves with the Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual for Solaris 10. In his blog on FAQ: Solaris Kernel tunables, Laurent suggests reviewing all the tunable parameters in the file to determine whether they need adjustment or still apply as is when upgrading from Solaris 8 or 9 OS to Solaris 10.
The Sun Blade X6220, X6250, and the T6320 Server Modules can now be deployed in a Sun Cluster environment with the recent addition of Sun Cluster support made available for these Sun servers. Datacenters will now be able to take advantage of the manageability and availability attributes of Sun Cluster 3.1 or 3.2 software when deploying these servers.
Sun Cluster 3.1 (8/05) and 3.2 Entitlements will now be available for select HP servers which have been tested and are now supported by Solaris Cluster software. Customers can now benefit from the availability features of Solaris Cluster with Solaris deployments on HP servers.
Sun is offering quad-core Intel Xeon X5365 processor for the Sun Blade X6250, AMD Opteron model 2224SE for the Sun Blade X6220 and an X-option Chassis Monitoring Module for the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System. Additionally, Intel processors for the Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems have been repriced.
The Sun Fire X4500 server now is available with 36TB and 48TB of internal disk storage capacity. The new configuration offers 48 pluggable SATA II disk drives (750GB, 1TB), 2 x AMD Opteron Model 290 (2.8GHz) dual-core processors, eight memory slots supporting DDR1/400 MHz Registered ECC DIMMs fitted with 16 GB main memory, and more.
Customers now have the option of 146GB internal hard disk drive (HDD) device for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000-M9000 servers. This new disk option can coexist with the already existing 73GB HDD in these servers. Sun also is offering a new internal rack jumper cord X-option for its Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000-M5000 servers.
The last order date for the Sun Fire X4600 M2 standard configuration with 4x AMD Opteron 8220 (2.8Ghz) processors on 4-DIMM board and the XATO base chassis with 850W power supplies has been set for January 11, 2008.
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 117 Issue 3, were:
Two New OpenSolaris Projects: CIFS Server and CIFS Client for Solaris [18957]
Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 - The World's Largest InfiniBand Core Switch [19003]
New ZFS Packages Offer Snapshots 0.9 and Backups 0.2 [18936]
Sun announced a new open source community for developers building next-generation datacenter virtualization and management technologies. OpenxVM will be the sight of a community hub for a number of open source projects related to virtualization software and data center automation tools. OpenSolaris xVM is available in build 75 of OpenSolaris and Solaris Express: Community Edition.
Open source Java projects will now be able to test their applications for defects on Coverity's static analysis tool, Prevent. Coverity's free service uses a 'Software DNA mapping' approach to static testing of code for defects that maps the most likely paths for code execution and target tests accordingly.
The MIT Press publication "Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming" by Barbara Chapman, Gabriele Jost and Ruud van der Pas is "the first really comprehensive book on parallel programming using the OpenMP API," writes Richard Friedman on Sun's Solaris Developer blog.
Apple plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early 2008 that could possibly result in the open-source Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) phoneME being ported to it, commented Technical Evangelist for the Java Mobile and Embedded Community Terrence Barr.
Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama has promised to embrace universally accessible formats if elected president, and subsequently received praise from the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance for his support of open standards.
Todd Jobson's blog on Processors and Performance : Chips, MIPS, and Sizing blips also appeared as an article that ran in nearly the same format in the November 2007 Sun Technocrat. Jobson examines CPUs and system architecture, as they relate to performance and capacity planning as a whole.
Ravindra Talashikar considers core utilization in his blog, where he looks at the two metrics mpstat/vmstat and hardware performance counters, both of equal importance in the question of performance analysis and tuning. The blogger confines his discussion to core utilization in the UltraSPARC T2, noting that everything he has earlier written on UltraSPARC T1 as it relates to thread scheduling, idle hardware thread, and stalled thread applies generally.
If you're interested in making a few NICs look like a whole lot more, have a glance at "Using IP Instances with VLANs or How to Make a Few NICs Look Like Many," where you will find detailed instructions (and the necessary code).
Sun Connection's blog site has an article on Moving zones between machines/hosts that considers both Zone Migration and Zone Move. Zone Migration, according to the blog, copies all files from the given Zone to a new host machine, then shuts down the first Zone and starts up the new one. This does not require shared storage because the data is copied over the network. Zone Move, on the other hand, shuts down the zone, unmounts the disk, re-mounts it on a new host, zone attaches it and starts it up.
Raghuraman Sesharaman, Navin Kumar, and Amol Chiplunkar have written two articles on the Solaris Container Manager. One describes how to consolidate servers and applications through the use of Solaris Container Manager, while the other covers Manager's new zone enhancements that are included in the zone wizard.
This BigAdmin featured tech tip offered by William Xue contains a procedure for partitioning disk slices and installing multiple versions of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), so one machine can be used to run different Solaris versions.
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