Timothy Prickett Morgan speculates on the future of the SPARC M4 processor and the respective roles Oracle and Fujitsu might be expected to play in its manufacture. "Speculates" is the operant word because Morgan concedes that neither company is being particularly vocal about the M4. The piece concludes with the opinion that the Oracle-Fujitsu collaboration might well be viable, with Oracle concentrating on entry- and mid-level systems and Fujitsu on HPC interconnects and SPARC chips tuned for massively parallel supercomputers. Given Oracle's reticence on the subject, the author is pursuing Fujitsu for details. More later ... or not.
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The clock is running on the goal to stage an exascale technology demonstration capable of handling a peak of 400 petaflops by 2015. This is more data than a single stream can deliver, so the search is on in the HPC community for a solution to these I/O demands. The hardware approach, writes Brent Gorda, Whamcloud CEO and President, in his HPCWire article "Why Lustre Is Set to Excel in Exascale," -- boosting performance on the single unit and going widely parallel -- will work until power limitations and parallelism issues become an impediment. Gorda enthusiastically nominates the Lustre file system to fill the software side of the equation. Lustre, he continues, based on an object store, has the necessary fundamental architecture for exascale, which the HPC file system technologists think will be based on an object store approach. It might work, Gorda continues, to introduce new file types to Lustre that will provide exascale object storage semantics internally. While this will require development of the underlying object model, Gorda points out that it holds the promise that the same file system will be able to support the full range of applications from (legacy) POSIX through to exascale. Finally, under development since 1999, Lustre has the maturity and stability that developers seek as the starting point for rapid and diverse development, Gorda concludes.
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Let’s face it, Grid Engine users and administrators are facing some key issues and critical junctures…. With the recent announcements by Oracle regarding the future of Grid Engine, they have to be asking a lot of questions. "How much is this going to cost?" "Will my current environment still be supported?" "Is Open Source ever really free?" "What are my options?" "How do I get started?"

We have brought together the experts to provide you with some guidance on how to navigate these recent changes, and provide information to help you make the decisions that are best for you and your business.

Join this webinar and hear from Industry Analyst and Platform Computing thought leaders about what Grid Engine users and administrators can do now to protect their HPC investments.
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