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Oracle: What now for HPC?

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There hasn’t been a lot of talk yet from Oracle about their plans for HPC now that the Sun purchase has been consummated.

What's going on? From what I can tell, it’s not that Oracle is necessarily holding anything back; it’s more that its approach to the market is still being shaped up. The big job was getting the systems roadmaps in place and communicated to the world – and there still are some who will argue that Oracle hasn’t been clear enough on that issue.

First invokedynamic call on SPARC

Today I successfully executed an invokedynamic call on SPARC for the first time.  Excellent!

Presenting at the SVOSUG on Thursday

I'm presenting at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group on Thursday evening. I was only asked today, so I'm putting together some slides this evening on "Multicore Application Programming". The talk is going to be a relatively high level presentation on writing parallel applications, and how the advent of multicore or CMT processors changes the dynamics.

What's New In Oracle Solaris Development Tools









Why don't YOU tell US?.









Tell us what capabilities you'd like our future code analysis tools to have in the areas of:

  • Implementation
  • Integration
  • Testing and Debugging
  • Maintenance
  • Predicting the stock market

In particular, we would like to know your preferences for static and dynamic code analysis capabilities, plus user interface features.

Intro to Service Domain Manager

Let's take a break from the Sun Grid Engine 6.2u5 feature posts and talk about something that's been in the product since 6.2. (It's actually the foundation of two of the remaining three features, so consider this ground work for finishing my u5 features series.)

How To Compile for Performance: Compiler Options For Beginners

When I build some source code and that I want to achieve the best performance I use the   Sun Studio compilers, especially on Solaris and SPARC.

Sun Studio offers a unique set of optimization features dedicated to processor instruction set that help me squeeze out the best perf out of C, C++ or Fortran code. Yet these options are so numerous that it can be a bit daunting to look into them.

Self Control

Good day, and welcome to week four of my continuing attempt to cover all the features added in the latest release (6.2u5) of Sun Grid Engine. This week we'll talk about array task throttling.

Oracle strategy webcasts available

Yes,  I am still here, and so is my blog ! The last few days have seen a lot of people move their blogs off blogs.sun.com, but I believe in keeping it here - if possible - and blogging about the integration of Sun products into Oracle. There are some exciting things happening in virtualization, cloud and Ops Center that I will try to blog about in the weeks to come.

Better Preemption

Continuing with the new feature theme, this week we're talking about slotwise subordination (AKA slotwise preemption). Preemption is the notion that a higher priority job can bump a lower priority job out of the way so it can execute. Pretty simple notion. Some workload managers have an implicit concept of preemption. Sun Grid Engine does not. We have what I like to call "after-market preemption". The net result is the same.

newbar: a Post-Processing Visualization tool

newbar 1.0: for Solaris 9 and higher

Originally there was perfbar.

"perfbar" gives a near realtime view of CPU utilization states.

In perfbar red=kernel, green=user, yellow=wait on IO, blue=idle, and white is indeterminate.

It is common for an early indication of a performance issue to be obvious in perfbar.

I decided that it would be wonderful to have a perfbar for threads. So I borrowed the gui for perfbar and modified it to use procfs to access thread CPU utilization states and display them ala perfbar.

thrbar : perfbar for threads

thrbar 1.0, for Solaris 9 and higher

Originally there was "perfbar".

"perfbar" gives a near realtime view of CPU utilization states.

In perfbar red=kernel, green=user, yellow=wait on IO, blue=idle, and white is indeterminate.

It is common for an early indication of a performance issue to be obvious in perfbar.

Topology-Aware Scheduling

Continuing in my feature deep dives, let's talk about topology-aware scheduling. Some applications have serious resource needs. Not only do they need raw CPU cores, but they also beat the snot out of the local cache or burn up the I/O channels. These sorts of applications don't play well with others. In fact, they often don't play well with themselves. For these applications, how the threads/processes are distributed across the CPUs makes a huge difference.

Logical Domains 1.3 Available

Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.3 is out!

LDoms 1.3 has been released

It's now possible to download the LDoms 1.3 software. The LDoms 1.3 Release Notes list all the new features but some of the ones I particularly like include:

Leading the Herd

Wow! There's been a surprising amount of noise lately about the Apache Hadoop integration with Sun Grid Engine 6.2u5. Since folks seem to be interested, I figure it's a good place to start on my feature deep-dive posts that I promised.

Sun Grid Engine: Still Firing on All Cylinders

The Sun Grid Engine team has just released the latest version of SGE, humbly called Sun Grid Engine 6.2 update 5.

Sun renueva el menor de la gama de servidores de misión-crítica

Sun Announces Faster and More Powerful SPARC M3000

Earlier today Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu rolled out a newly enhanced and very powerful entry-level M3000 server that will not only allow customers to consolidate multiple low-end systems, but also save tons of money and space.


The upgraded M3000 is a single-socket system now powered by the new quad-core 2.7GHz SPARC64 VII processor. The new chip not only has a higher frequency than its predecessor, but combined with its faster system memory, offers up to 23 percent better performance.

Sun & Fujitsu Boost Performance of Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000

Sun and Fujitsu today announced an enhanced SPARC Enterprise M3000 server with the new 2.75GHz SPARC64 VII processor.  Using the faster processor boosts performance of the single-socket server and delivers enterprise performance and mission-critical reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) at an entry-level price.  It’s an ideal platform to handle database, BIDW, ERP and CRM applications.

Welcome Sun Grid Engine 6.2 update 5

sun_grid.jpg
Interesting features

The Sun Grid Engine 6.2 update 5 release is now available. Don't let the unassuming version number fool you; there's quite a few interesting features packed into this release. Let's talk about them, shall we?

Using the MilaX Live CD for Failsafe Booting on SPARC Machines

This BigAdmin community tech tip describes how to convert the MilaX Live CD to a failsafe image for a Solaris installation on SPARC machines.

SJS AS 9.1 U2 (GF v2 U2) - Patch 13 // GF v2.1 - Patch 7 // Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 Patch 1

SJS AS 9.1 U2 (GF v2 U2) patch 13 is a commercial (Restricted) patch
(see Overview of GFv2)
available as part of
>Sun's Enterprise Support for GlassFish.
This release is also patch 7 of
GlassFish 2.1
and patch 1 of
GlassFish 2.1.1

Powersaving with SDM1.0u5

 To use the power saving feature of Sun Grid Engine you have to install the Service Domain Manager (SDM). Please watch the video of Marcin and Andre that explains the basic steps to get a SDM system running.

SDM can boot up and shutdown host automatically if the host has an service controller that support IPMI 2.0. The Lan interface of the service controller must be enabled an reachable from the master host of the SDM system.

Microprocessadores de 48 núcleos... O que vem depois? - Computação quântica?

A Intel produziu uma jóia com o microprocessador Nehalem. Ainda
que a arquitetura atual limite o chip a oito núcleos de processamento,
a Intel continua fazendo pesquisas e avançando no seu desenvolvimento
com ideias muito mais ambiciosas. As amos

48 核微处理器... 接下来会是什么? - 量子计算?

英特尔通过 Nehalem
微处理器推出了一个先进的架构。尽管该架构现在将芯片限制在 8
个处理内核,但是英特尔凭借更为大胆的想法正在研制更先进的微处理器。

48 コアのマイクロプロセッサ...次は何 ? 量子コンピューティング ?

Intel は Nehalem
マイクロプロセッサで優れた技術を見せました。

48 ядерный микропроцессор... А дальше? - Квантовый компьютер?

Компания Intel создала "бриллиант" на основе микропроцессора Nehalem
Несмотря на то, что сегодняшним пределом, с точки зрения архитектуры

Microprocesadores de 48 núcleos... ¿Qué viene a continuación, - Computación Quantum?

Intel ha fabricado una gema con el microprocesador Nehalem.
Mientras que la arquitectura actual limita el chip a ocho núcleos de
procesamiento, Intel sigue investigando y avanzando en su desarrollo
con ideas mucho más ambiciosas. Los ejemplos de proces

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