In a youtube video, a Sun engineer demonstrates the effectiveness of the Analytics feature of Sun Storage 7000 series, by literally shouting at the disks to cause a brief performance problem.
JRuby 1.1.6 is a new release of the JRuby Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter.
Sun and SAP have signed a multi-year agreement that will allow Sun to provide Java Platform Standard Edition for Business to its customers using the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. It also will allow SAP customers to continue using Java SE 1.4.2 on both Windows (x86_32, x86_64, IA64) and Linux (x86_32, IA64) platforms with the understanding that Sun will continue to provide support and indemnification.
Two new virtualization solutions have been added to Sun's small- and medium-sized business (SMB) portfolio that combine Sun's x64 server and open storage products with VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V software. The company also reported that its Sun Fire X4450 server set a new world record benchmark, posting the best VMmark score among all results based on Intel Xeon processor technology and demonstrating its capability as a highly scalable virtualization platform.
Linux aficionado Steve Lawson (aka Red Devil) became interested in trying out OpenSolaris 2008.11 as he perused articles with tantalizing headlines like: "Will OpenSolaris 2008.11 attract Linux users?" and "OpenSolaris tackles Ubuntu dominance." After playing with Sun's open source platform, Lawson offers the following replies to those headlines respectively: "Yes, if they have any sense" and "No, it doesn't, not yet - but one day soon it should."
The OpenSolaris Test Farm virtual machine interface is ready for use by OpenSolaris contributors. Sun Software Engineer Jim Walker reports that this interface allows users to reserve whole root development zones where they can build and test software prior to contributing to the OpenSolaris code base. Additionally, access requirements have been updated to allow any OpenSolaris user to access test farm.
According to Sun CIO Bob Worrall, virtualization is a technology that is still evolving and that has some distance to go before it matures, writes Dave Bailey in Australia's iTnews. The pace of this evolution is driven in part by graduate curricula in computer science, Worrall observes. He also contends that IT will not go the way of so many other aspects of the economy, saying that outsourcing to cloud computing is not as likely a scenario as the increased employment of software-as-a-service.
David Salbego, director of IT Infrastructure at Argonne National Labs, chats with Sun's Alex Plant in a brief interview on Customer Corner about his role at the lab and how Sun technology has become an integral part of the entity's operations.
For users who want to share resources more widely across the organization and make better decisions quicker by enabling remote workgroups to view and analyze large datasets, Sun shared Visualization software gives you that power.
Sun Shared Visualization software is based on the open source VirtualGL project.
The University of Houston has implemented a new Sun/AMD HPC computing cluster in its Research Computing Center (RCC) in collaboration with the Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC2). The cluster contains 82 Sun servers ranging from the Sun X2200 and Sun X4600 series equipped with AMD 2.3 Gigahertz processors and a combination of Ethernet and Infiniband networking. The cluster uses Red Hat Linux as its operating system, which offers a range of functionality and is available for use on research systems through the campus site license. The cluster was installed for a cost of approximately $200,000.
Sun Grid Engine is an open source and highly scalable distributed resource management (DRM) system. Version 6.2 of the Sun Grid Engine has been updated. Update 1 is a a patch release and is the current version recommended for production environments. Update 2 Beta is a feature patch release and adds new functionality to the software. These binaries are for the participants to the public beta testing of SGE 6.3 Update 2 beta.
Readers interested in the Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 Beta Program will find interesting reading in Lubomir Petrik's blog, which recounts details of the program. Petrik notes that the Beta program is intended for users who already have experience with the Sun Grid Engine software or DRM (Distributed Resource Management) systems of other vendors, and that the beta program will run until Monday, February 2, 2009.
Increase performance up to 30% and power savings at idle by up to 35% with the Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers and its enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. This entry level server is a new high performance, low cost, and energy-efficient 2-socket server added to Sun's x64 rack-optimized server family -- a price/performance optimized solution for customers who desire to maximize their computing resources with limited budgets by utilizing system redundancy (e.g. break/replace server) rather than component redundancy (e.g. redundant PSUs/fans).
The new 450 GB 15K Fibre-Channel Disks provide increased performance levels in comparison
to the currently offered 400GB 10K rpm disks and higher capacity than the current 300GB/15K rpm disks at excellent performance levels.
Sun Engineer Brendan Gregg on the Fishworks team discovered that vocal vibrations affect disk latency through the use of Analytics from Fishworks. In a two-minute YouTube video that has garnered the attention of over a quarter of a million people, Gregg demonstrates how his vocal vibrations cause a sharp spike in the number of I/O operations per disk and a noticeable latency increase on the overall workload.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 131 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
How Does SAP Perform on Solaris x64 Compared to Linux? [21022]
Sun is offering what it terms the Sun Corporate Learning Pass Program, which provides customers with up to a 40% discount on comprehensive technical training from Sun Microsystems. The program includes multiple education training credits that can be used for classes from Sun's course catalog to support ongoing employee development, along with a 12-month subscription to the Solaris or Java eLibrary and multiple Certification Exam Vouchers that employees can use to pursue Sun professional certification.
The Australian open source community welcomes the incorporation of the DTrace performance analysis and debugging tool into the FreeBSD platform with the release of FreeBSD 7.1, reports Renai LeMay, writing for ZDNet.com.au. Similar sentiments have been reported from other segments of the worldwide open source community. (ZFS was included in FreeBSD 7.0.)
Refer to this index for a conglomerate of Sun Studio and Sun Studio Express reference materials. This index provides links to reference guides and informative topic-related articles written by industry professionals.
Topics: General, C/C++, Fortran, Debugging, Performance Analysis and Optimization, X86/x64, and Parallel/Multithreaded Programming.
After taking a look at Tom Daly's post on compelling price/performance, John Clingan took a slightly different approach. Tom's post covers the details of the recent 100% open source software result of 1197.1 JOPS@Standard using GlassFish, OpenSolaris and MySQL running on a Sun X4150 Server. The competitive results are also on quad-core X64 servers. Daly's post shows the raw data; Clingan's, the updated $/JOP. In Clingan's post, GlassFish is the clear winner.
Disagreement over the interpretation of power consumption figures on datacenter cooling continues throughout the industry, and BM Seer's latest blog duly notes the controversy. Seer writes, "Real measured watts on a variety of workloads with real-sized memory configurations is critical to truly inform customers." His post includes figures on the UltraSPARC T1 and T2-based servers, as well as Xeon-based and Opteron-based servers.
Three recent papers by Sun engineers on the BigAdmin site include Alan Adamson's "Understanding PCI Express Maximum Payload Size on OpenSolaris," Lily Zhao's "Simple Demo for Ruby on Rails with the Solaris 10 OS," and "Observability Using Java Platform, Standard Edition 6, and Solaris OS" by A. Sundarajan and Jim Holmlund.
Kothakota's blog explains the differences, details, I/O CLIs, and troubleshooting tips for the significant network NIU Hybrid I/O feature of the LDoms 1.1 release. "[The] NIU Hybrid I/O provides a very high bandwidth with low latency directly to a Guest domain. This technology now limited UltraSPARC-T2(Niagara-II) cpu based platforms only."
"OpenSolaris Bible"
OpenSolaris Tutorial and Reference for Novice Users to Experienced Admins
OpenSolaris Bible, the first English-language OpenSolaris book, is a comprehensive resource on using OpenSolaris. Written by active OpenSolaris contributors Nicholas Solter, Jerry Jelinek, and David Miner, it covers introductory to advanced topics including the bash shell, GNOME desktop, software management with IPS, ZFS, Networking, CIFS, Security, SMF, DTrace, Clustering, Zones, VirtualBox, xVM, the AMP stack, NetBeans, and much more.
Miller's Java SE 7 expectations reveal which JSRs are in and which are out.
Topics: Better dependency management, Project Jigsaw and the 'module' keyword, (More) NIO APIs, Tackling the time dimension, Parallel processing, Better precision through annotations, Simplifying Swing, Language changes, Dynamic-language support, Java SE 7 and the future of Java.
JRuby 1.1.6, a new release of the JRuby Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, is now available and brings with it patches addressing compatibility issues and enhanced performance, writes Darryl K. Taft in eWeek.com.
"100 NetBeans IDE Tips and Tricks: Your Guide to Finding Your Way Around the NetBeans IDE" by Ruth Kusterer is a new book published by Prentice Hall that includes the best technical tips for the NetBeans IDE, collected from community blogs, forums, NetBeans evangelists, and the author’s personal experience. The default software version for these tips is NetBeans IDE 6.0, when a feature is specific to another version, it is called out. The default platform is Microsoft Windows; Mac OS keyboard shortcuts are noted in parentheses.
Robin Wilton, corporate architect on Sun's CTO team, has published a paper in the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management (IJIPM) that explains how privacy arises from the correct interaction of data and policy. In the paper, Wilton describes the different types of identity data and, through the use of a simple data model, relates it to typical system architectures and then to privacy as an information systems policy objective.
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