High Performance Computing (HPC) headlines this week's edition.
Sun's showing at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 produced new HPC solutions, including the Sun Blade X6450 Server Module and Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24, among others.
At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held this past week in Dresden, Germany, Sun announced it is expanding its Sun Blade and Sun Constellation System families for the HPC market as well as adding a new Storage and Archive solution for HPC and updated software and development tools that simplify HPC cluster installation and management. Sun's HPC portfolio of products and solutions is aimed at enabling mainstream HPC customers across all industries.
High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) in Canada has selected Sun infrastructure to power Victoria Falls, its new compute cluster based on 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers and the Solaris 10 OS. HPC codes well suited for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 include applications that require high levels of parallelization and/or very high memory bandwidth. Running at full capacity, the Sun-powered Victoria Falls HPC cluster is designed to process nearly 10,000 threads simultaneously.
Sun is making a motion towards a more efficient workday for 19,000 of its employees around the world. In an in-depth study recently conducted on 100 participants of Sun's Open Work program, Sun workers' savings in time, money and their individual carbon output were reported.
Ethisphere Magazine has chosen its list of the World's Most Ethical Companies for 2008. Sun is one of three computer hardware manufacturers named, along with Cisco Systems and Xerox. Candidates were assessed on the basis of their corporate citizenship and responsibility; corporate governance; internal systems and ethics/compliance program; legal regulatory and reputation track record; innovation that contributes to public well-being; executive leadership and tone from the top; and industry leadership.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes:
Sun at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008
Sun Ranked Fourth in Top 500 Supercomputers
Qualifying Applications for Solaris Zones
Managing Third Party Integration with Sun Systems
Sun Incorporating Symantec Storage Virtualization Software
Download Cool Stack 1.3
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) on Solaris OS
Upgrading to Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0.3 from 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 is the subject of Jason Beloro's blog, which provides a step-by-step how-to, offering clarifications to the information available in the Administration Guide.
The 293-page API specification for Logical Domains (LDoms) and the SPARC hypervisor is now available from opensparc.net. The specification details the UltraSPARC virtual machine environment together with the calling conventions and detailed specifications of the virtual machine interfaces provided to a LDom.
The news is that "Snow Leopard," also known as the Mac OS X v10.6, will support the Solaris ZFS file system when it is released in about a year's time. Apple's Web site is hosting the announcement: "For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots."
A recent Sun webcast features Darrel Gove, senior staff engineer at Sun, and Rebecca Amey, Sun director of the HPC software, who discuss the HPC Developer Tools software and its relevance to single core users and those interested in running clusters.
BigAdmin XPerts section is hosting a session on Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 Containers, which means anyone with questions regarding these two Sun products can get answers from an assigned expert. In this case, it is 10-year Sun veteran Jeff Victor, who is a systems engineer currently serving as a technical specialist advising customers about server virtualization technologies.
During the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 held this past week in Dresden, Germany, Sun Vice President of Americas Systems Practice in Sun's Global Sales and Service organization Marc Hamilton presented a session covering Sun's full range of HPC solutions. Visit the Sun Web site for the webcast.
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.
The next release of MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 - a real-time, shared-nothing clustered database system that has been especially designed to meet the high-availability, scalability and low latency requirements of telecom applications - was announced by Sun during the NXTcomm 2008 tradeshow held this past week in Las Vegas. Open sourced under the GPL license, MySQL Cluster is available for Solaris, RHEL and SUSE Linux, and Mac OS X.
Under the name "Open High Availability Cluster," over two million lines of source code for the complete Solaris Cluster core are now available to the open source community. A podcast by Meenakshi Kaul-Basu provides details of the release.
More than 100 extensions are now available in the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository, including template packs, a report designer, tools for professional writers, translation, presentation compression functionality and others. One of the most recent releases is the PDF Import Extension that allows users to import and modify PDF documents in OpenOffice.org Draw and export them to the Open Document Format (ODF).
Jason Baragry has created a series of screencasts that introduce OpenESB. His screencasts show the Open Enterprise Service Bus (OpenESB) as an effective tool for building a simple composite application that shows multiple Service Engines and Binding Components. The goal is to reinforce the concepts of Java Business Integration (JBI).
There is a voice-over screencast that will inform viewers about the features of the Simple API for Workflow (SAW) Plug-in, a feature in OpenPortal that is intended to offer a generic workflow API to perform human workflow interaction with various workflow engines.
Tolven Inc. is an open source healthcare solutions provider that recently completed a benchmarking exercise using PostgreSQL 8.2.6 (32-bit) on the Solaris 10 and using ZFS on a Sun Fire X4600 Server. The aim of this benchmarking exercise was to determine the scalability and performance characteristics of the Tolven open source healthcare information technology solution.
From the Sun Developer Network, here's a how-to on getting the most out of the CIFS server feature in the OpenSolaris OS that involves using ZFS and CIFS to create a home NAS box that replaces a Windows share machine. The operation takes about two hours to assemble the server hardware, install the OS and to configure the storage.
There are several approaches to backing up and restoring a MySQL Database, and a few techniques are presented in an entry from the Online Diary blog with the commands necessary to accomplish each. The author notes that these procedures are also useful for moving data to new web servers.
zembly is the world's first collaborative environment specifically designed for creating social applications. Through the use of just a browser, zembly allows Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, Meebo apps, iPhone applications, widgets, Google gadgets and other social Web applications to be collaboratively built and published.
The new Project SocialSite is ideal for those running web applications or community sites who want to add social networking to create an Open Social container.
Authors Michael Haines and David Edmondson have spent over a year preparing their important Sun BluePrints OnLine piece, "Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture." (63 pages) During that period, as Xen morphed into the xVM Hypervisor, the authors were aiming at a constantly moving target. A similar evolutionary pace will make it necessary to continue revisions into the future. Here, however, as things stand at the moment, are the secrets of xVM Hypervisor exposed.
There are some questions a users needs to ask before deciding to rely on ZFS for replication between remote sites: How much data can you afford to lose; how much data gets written to the filesystem; and how much data can you send over ssh? What to make of the answers to these questions is considered in a Sun blog that then presents several additional questions to be answered before proceeding to the use of ZFS for replication between remote sites.
Extend server capabilities through the Sun xVM hypervisor software on the x86 family of processor architectures by using virtual machine instances based on the work of the Open Xen Community. A BigAdmin Sun Doc by Penny Cotten covers the basics on Sun's virtualization system.
Gerry Haskins' Patch Corner blog argues for the soundness of using the well-tested Solaris OS patch routine as a means of bringing one's copy up to date in case corporate policies dictate against an outright upgrade. The specific patch he champions is the recently released Solaris 10 05/08 (Update 5) Patch Bundle.
Russell J. T. Dyer has come out with a second edition of his book "MySQL in a Nutshell." The book includes changes and improvements made to MySQL since Sun purchased MySQL AB.
Thinking about taking the J2EE 1.5 Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD) exam? You might want to get hold of a copy of "Head First Servlets & JSP, Second Edition," from O'Reilly. Word is that the new exam -- three hours and 69 questions in length -- is considerably tougher than the previous version. The US$49.99 guide, written by Bryan Basham, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, all members of the SCWCD development team, is said to be the best route to attaining this prized certification.
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