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From Siwiki

"Ranger" Supercomputer Now Available To Texas Researchers (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Thu July 24 2008) "Ranger," one of the largest open science computing systems in the world, is now available to researchers at all Texas higher education institutions, according to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (...

Peeling the MySQL Scalability Onion (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed July 23 2008) pre { background-color:#eeeeee; } tt {color:#395d76; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold;} In this blog I will talk about how we (the Sun/MySQL Performance Team) eliminated the need for a lock to get b...

Video: DE Shaw - Toward Millisecond-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Proteins (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Wed July 23 2008) In this video, Dr. John Salmon, D. E. Shaw Research, presents at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. Recorded June 20, 2008. Abstract: The ability to perform long, ...

NYC Seminar: HPC in Financial Services Industry, July 23 (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 22 2008) Please join Sun Microsystems and Acumem for an informative seminar on High Performance Computing for the Financial Services Industry in New York City on July 23, 2008. The following topics will be pr...

Is x64 the final answer for HPC? (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 22 2008) Express Computer writes that HPC is becoming increasingly popular amongst media and entertainment companies and their platform of choice is none other than 64-bit x86: Karthik Ramarao, Director-Tech...

Podcast: Mr. Multi-Core on Pervasive Parallelism (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon July 21 2008) In this episode of Semi-Coherent Computing, Ashlee Vance at the Register sat down with Kunle Olukotun to talk about his life, his work and his vision for computing's future: "As head of Stanford's n...

Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sun July 20 2008) Michael Feldman over at HPC Wire writes on Sun's Fortress parallel programming language: "If anyone knows how to introduce a new programming language, it's Sun Microsystems. The company's highly suc...

Sun Ignites Blades Market Across the Middle East (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sat July 19 2008) Sun Microsystems has announced dramatic customer and revenue growth for its entire line of Sun Blade systems, distinguishing itself as the worldwide leader in year-on- year blade server growth in unit...

Revisiting the Intel 432 (The Observation Deck)

(Fri July 18 2008) As I have discussed before, I strongly believe that to understand systems, you must understand their pathologies -- systems are most instructive when they fail. Unfortunately, we in computing systems...

Grid.org Community Launches Major Site Upgrade (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Fri July 18 2008) Grid.org, the open source community for cluster and grid users, administrators and developers, unveiled its new website today at www.grid.org. With an interface and usability overhaul, as well as inno...

SPECjvm2008 Sun Fire X4450 First Result Ever Published (BM Seer)

(Thu July 17 2008) The Sun Fire X4450 server demonstrates Sun's position of leadership in Java based computing by publishing the first result ever for the new SPEC benchmark JVM2008. The Sun Fire X4450 server delivered...

Ranger Supercomputer Gets Processor Boost (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Thu July 17 2008) The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has announced that "Ranger," its world-class Sun supercomputer, has been upgraded with new Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processors. TACC now offers the national o...

SPEComp2001 Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 2.52GHz (BM Seer)

(Wed July 16 2008) The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server using the new SPARC64 VII 2.52 GHz processor delivered a SPECompM2001 result of 104,714. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server (2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors) ...

SPECompL2001 Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 @ 2.52GHz (BM Seer)

(Wed July 16 2008) The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server using the new SPARC64 VII 2.52 GHz processor delivered results on the SPEC OMPL2001 benchmarks. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, powered by 2.52GHz SPARC64...

The 15-petabyte network behind the Cern atom smasher (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Wed July 16 2008) When CERN powers up the Large Hadron Collider in August, an unprecedented network of researchers and computing power will be ready to process legions of data: "The Large Hadron Collider Computing Gr...

YouTube: Sun Unveils Latest InfiniBand Switch (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 15 2008) In this video, Sun's Marc Hamilton unveils the company's latest InfiniBand switch: the Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24. Recorded at the ISC conference in Dresden, Germany on June 17, 2008....

Video: Sun HPC Software - Clustering Made Easy (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 15 2008) In this video, Sun's Art Beckman and Makia Minich present on Sun's HPC software stacks for OpenSolaris and Linux. Recorded at Sun's HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany on June 2008. Download PDF...

more on gallon/mile not MPG and huge amount of datacenter power draws (BM Seer)

(Tue July 15 2008) ecogeek covers whey MPG (miles/gallon) is a silly measuremnt and why gallons/mile is a much better metric. The didn't draw the conclusions that watt/performance is also the better measurement, but th...

Download Lustre 1.6.5.1 (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 15 2008) Lustre 1.6.5.1 is now available on the Sun Download Center Site. The change log and release notes can be read here: http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php?title=Change_Log_1.6 As always, you can repor...

Linpack HPC benchmark Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 @ 2.52GHz (BM Seer)

(Mon July 14 2008) The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark. For single servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperforms...

Sun's Newest SMP: World-Record Floating-Point (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon July 14 2008) The new Sun SPARC Enterprise servers have delivered two floating-point World Record results on industry-standard SPECfp2006 benchmark for both Optimized and Base tests. The SPARC Enterprise M9000...

World Record SAP-SD 2-Tier: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 SPARC64 VII SAP-SD 2-Tier ERP 6.0 (2005) (BM Seer)

(Mon July 14 2008) The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (64 processors, 256 cores, 512 threads) set a World Record for the SAP-SD 2-Tier Standard Application benchmark. World Record SAP-SD 2-Tier: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 S...

Announcing Sun HPC Software: Linux Edition (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon July 14 2008) The all-new Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition Preview is an integrated, open-source software solution for Sun HPC clusters. It simplifies the deployment of HPC clusters by providing a ready-made framewo...

Next Big Thing in Research: Zotero (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon July 14 2008) Savvy faculty, college students, lawyers, librarians, and anyone who collects and uses references are realizing the benefits of using Zotero, an innovative research collection, management and citation...

CUDA renders ClearSpeed as yesterday's newspaper (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sun July 13 2008) HPC remains a brutally competive space where even the most innovative companies have no lock on survival. The Inside HPC blog points us to this entry at Scalability.org on the competitive economics th...

SDSC Gets Set for Storage Explosion (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sat July 12 2008) The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), which has one of the largest SANs in U.S. academia, is overhauling its hulking 28-Pbyte storage system to support some spectacular data growth: "Sun/Storag...

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) performance (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Fri July 11 2008) On a recent rev of Nevada, I just ran some ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) ubenchmarks, comparing a UltraSPARC T2 using the HW crypto accelerators and a 3GHz Xeon: These numbers are for ecdsa op...

High performance software crypto on CMT processors (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Fri July 11 2008) While cryptography is typically viewed as computationally intensive (and so less well suited to CMT processors), software implementations of common cryptographic algorithms can be readily optimized ...

Video: New Security Features in OpenSolaris (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Fri July 11 2008) In this video, Jan Pechanec and Mark Phalan presents on New Security Features in OpenSolaris. Recorded at the OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Prague, June 26, 2008....

First SPECjvm2008 Result Published! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Thu July 10 2008) The first ever SPECjvm2008 result has been published on the SPEC website. The Sun result stands alone, with no other hardware or software vendor stepping forward. This is the example of the confiden...

Video: OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework (reposted) (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Thu July 10 2008) In this video, Wolfgang Ley presents on the OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework. Recorded at the OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 26, 2008. Ed note: Audio issues with this prog...

Video: Developing in C++ with OpenSolaris and Sun Studio 12 (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Wed July 9 2008) In this video, Adriaan de Groot presents developing in C++ with OpenSolaris and Sun Studio 12. Recorded at the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 28, 2008....

Video: MilaX - OpenSolaris small LiveCD distro (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 8 2008) In this video, Alexander Eremin: MilaX presents on the OpenSolaris small LiveCD distro. Recorded at the OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 26, 2008....

Storage engine or MySQL server? Where has the time gone? (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Mon July 7 2008) I want to answer a simple question - If a query takes X milliseconds, how much of it is spent in the storage engine, and how much in the MySQL server? Why do I think is important? Well, since I am wor...

Apache Harmony: Thanks for the TreeMap Work! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Mon July 7 2008) I'd like to thank Apache Harmony for their JDK library performance efforts. We were given a tip that the Harmony folks were doing some interesting work with the TreeMap collection class, and low and ...

JDK 6 Update 6 Performance Release is here! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Mon July 7 2008) I'm please to announce the release of JDK 6 Update 6 Performance Release on SPARC platforms. This is the latest of our performance releases and is the culmination of our optimization efforts over the...

Video: Translation of OpenSolaris (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon July 7 2008) In this video, Petr Tomá?ek, Ale? ?erno?ek, and Robert Malovec present tutorials on the Translation of OpenSolaris. Recorded at the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 28, 2008....

Video: OpenSolaris and NUMA Architectures (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sat July 5 2008) In this video, Rafael Vanoni Polanczyk presents on OpenSolaris and NUMA Architectures. Recorded at the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 28, 2008....

Video: Examining ZFS On-Disk Format Using mdb and zdb (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Fri July 4 2008) In this video, Max Bruning presents on the ZFS On-Disk Format Using mdb and zdb. Recorded at the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 28, 2008....

Video: Totalview Technologies Update (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Thu July 3 2008) In this video, Nikolay Piskun, Director of Continuing Engineering, Totalview Technologies presents on the company's HPC solutions. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany on June 16...

Video: Lustre Roadmap Update (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Wed July 2 2008) In this video, Sun's Peter Bojanic presents on the roadmap for the Lustre file system. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, June 15, 2008. Download PDF...

The LinkedIn Cloud (fintanr's weblog)

(Wed July 2 2008) An interesting blog which passed over my desk recently on Linked In's architecture. Well worth a read. Solaris, Java & MySQL - seems like the perfect software stack to me ;)....

Video: Thebes Grid Middleware Consortium Update (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Tue July 1 2008) In this video, Georgetown's Arnie Miles presents on the Thebes project. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, June 15, 2008. Download PDF...

DTrace on Linux (The Observation Deck)

(Mon June 30 2008) The interest in DTrace on Linux is heating up again -- this time in an inferno on the Linux 2008 Kernel Summit discussion list. Under discussion is SystemTap, the Linux-born DTrace-knockoff, with peo...

Crypto wiki (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon June 30 2008) I've been gradually expanding the crypto wiki (which can be found here); adding additional info and some code examples. Please let me know what additional information would be useful to add, how the...

Video: Deployment of the TACC Ranger System (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Mon June 30 2008) In this video, TACC's Karl Schulz presents on the TACC Ranger System, which was recently ranked as the fourth fastest supercomputer on the planet according to TOP500.org. Recorded at the Sun HPC C...

SC08 Newsletter (Sun HPC Watercooler)

(Sun June 29 2008) The latest SC08 Newsletter is out with these headlines: * SC08 Challenges Showcase HPC Expertise, Resources * Seymour Cray Computer Engineering and Sidney Fernbach Memorial Awards Nominations Now Be...

Improving filesort performance in MySQL (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed June 25 2008) I recently filed Bug #37359 filesort can be more efficient based on some performance work with an industry standard benchmark. Read on if the internals of how MySQL implements filesort interests you. ...

Moving to a new location (Ariel Hendel)

(Wed June 25 2008) Not sure what thematic turn my blog will take, but the new location is HERE: http://ariel-hendel.blogspot.com See you there....

DTrace in New York (The Wall)

(Tue June 24 2008) Back in February I gave several DTrace talks in New York, including one at the New York OpenSolaris User Group meeting (NYCOSUG). I used an updated slide deck and was asked to put the PDF on my blog;...

High-performance SHA-1 (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon June 23 2008) In my recent CommunityOne Microparallelism presentation, one of the cases studies discusses how to convert high ILP code on superscalar processors into the TLP implementations on CMT processors. The...

mpg and perf/watt are misleading (BM Seer)

(Mon June 23 2008) Last friday I blogged about an article on Duke University's Larrick & Soll's research: Posting a vehicle?s fuel efficiency in ?gallons per mile? (GPM) rather than ?miles per gallon? (MPG) would help ...

Dont' use mpg & perf/watt, please use gpm & watt/perf! (BM Seer)

(Fri June 20 2008) miles/gallon is as misleading to consumers! Remember when I said perf/watt is misleading. How do we all avoid these 'math illusions'? Duke University researchers tell us this is simple, just "flip '...

Sun's new IB switches (BM Seer)

(Fri June 20 2008) Sun is talking more about its IB switches. The large-scale switch is called the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456. You may have seen its internal Sun code name "Magnum." Sun uses some of these highlights ...

Sun Launches Sun Blade X6450 Server (Xeon) Module Today (BM Seer)

(Wed June 18 2008) Today Sun announced its powerful new Sun Blade X6450 server module at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany (blog pics here). sun.com Sun Blade X6450 features Sun wr...

Blogging bosses... (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue June 17 2008) My new boss, Amy O'Connor, (well my bosses boss) got a mention over on the On The Record blog last week, but for a slightly less formal introduction, and a lot more background, take a look at her blo...

Link compression (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Fri June 13 2008) I've been spending some time over recent years looking into the potential for leveraging compression on various off-chip links. In July's issue of IEEE Transactions on Computing, there is an article...

another useless unrealistic uber-simplistic TPC-C result (BM Seer)

(Thu June 12 2008) The IBM Power 595 IBM reached over 6 million tpmC on the TPC-C benchmark, but IBM avoids single-system TPC-H like the plague, why? Why didn't IBM measure and publish server watts actually used on th...

Winner's Curse (Ariel Hendel)

(Wed June 11 2008) It is time to wrap this CMT blog journey with a paradox, because CMT has done the unthinkable. CMT started as a radical exercise in putting all processing in one socket next to one big fat memory to ...

Eco on the desktop: Thin(Sunray) vs. Thick(big PC) (BM Seer)

(Wed June 11 2008) Thick versus Thin Clients: Today online at 4PM(east)/1PM(pac) there will be a debate to discuss the energy use and TCO of a thin client model versus their thicker alternatives. See: http://blogs.inte...

SPECpower_ssj too many measurements? (BM Seer)

(Mon June 9 2008) A posting last week, clearly demonstrated that even small increases in utilisations provide HUGE savings". Then I started looking at the data, it seems that one only really needs two points(!) {activ...

Virtualization needs memory, what are the watts for those memory sizes? (BM Seer)

(Thu June 5 2008) Intel's recommendation for 2-socket Xeon QC is 16GB of memory, I'm assuming 4-socket QC is 32GB when I look at this and other docs: http://www.itworldcanada.com/documents/server-virtualization.pdf ...

Crypto performance wiki (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed June 4 2008) I've started a wiki to capture the more pertinent info on UltraSPARC crypto performance in a more organized form. ...

Idle servers are the devil's watt guzzlers (BM Seer)

(Wed June 4 2008) Servers are very different than laptops, DUH! Therefore one must benchmark power in a very different way. We all know that laptops spend lots of time at low utilisation or idle (waiting for your in...

A Tribute to Jim Gray (The Observation Deck)

(Sat May 31 2008) Like several hundred others, I spent today at Berkeley at a tribute to honor Jim Gray. While many there today had collaborated with Jim in some capacity, my own connection to him is tertiary at best:...

Changing your %util a tiny bit, saves lots of money & energy! (BM Seer)

(Fri May 30 2008) The SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark goes out of its way to measure servers at low-utilisation (5 of 11 datapoints are in the wasteful active-idle to 40% range - the worst range for servers). SPECpower_s...

Using the UltraSPARC hardware cryptographic accelerators (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu May 29 2008) A brief synopsis of how to leverage the UltraSPARC hardware cryptographic accelerators from your application. Introduction Sun's UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2Plus processors support high-performanc...

VMWare's blog on VMmark performance & measured watts (BM Seer)

(Wed May 21 2008) Watts used during VMware's VMmark benchmark are now shown on the official VMware blog at: blogs.vmware.com/performance/2008/05/sun-uses-vmmark.html. It also shows a graph of the wattage data. Other ...

MySQL and UltraSPARC T2 crypto (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed May 21 2008) I've started looking at how to leverage the UltraSPARC T2 hardware cryptographic accelerators to improve MySQL performance and there are a couple of interesting opportunities; SSL is used to sec...

UltraSPARC T2plus (VF) crypto (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Tue May 20 2008) Just been playing with crypto on a 2-way UltraSPARC T2plus (Victoria Falls) system. The system, with 16-cores running at 1.2GHz was running Nevada 89, and my crypto microbenchmarks scaled very nicel...

MySQL on ZFS (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue May 20 2008) Nice brief article over on dev.mysql.com - A look at MySQL on ZFS....

Sun's summary of measured watts & watt/performance (BM Seer)

(Fri May 16 2008) Sun has shown watts on UltraSPARC for years!: 2008: UltraSPARC T2+ 2007: UltraSPARC T2 2005: UltraSPARC T1 & T2000 blogs with power-performance Sun is now showing measured watts with measured perform...

Google search features (BM Seer)

(Fri May 16 2008) Beyond getting a nice drop-down date range menu for Google search, there are some other things which can make google searching more effective: view:timeline - display a graph choosing the #results by...

Sun Fire X4440 Best Opteron Multi-JVM Performance SPECjbb2005 at 606watts (BM Seer)

(Thu May 15 2008) The Sun Fire X4440 (4 2.3GHz Opteron QC) (system 606watts measured) running Sun Java SE 6 Update 6-p achieved a result of 372467 SPECjbb2005 bops, 46558 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM for the best score for all...

Sun World Record for Largest Data Warehouse - One Petabyte! (BM Seer)

(Thu May 15 2008) Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, Sybase IQ, and BMMsoft Server managed one Petabyte of raw data. That was over 6 trillion rows of transactional data and more than 185 million content-searchable doc...

Java and hardware cryptographic acceleration (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed May 14 2008) I've just been experimenting with Java Cryptographic Framework (JCE) on the UltraSPARC T2 processor and it is important to remember which algorithms/modes/padding are supported for offload to the cr...

The new ZFS write throttle (Bizarre ! Vous avez dit Bizarre ?)

(Wed May 14 2008) A very significant improvement is coming soon to ZFS. A change that will increase the general quality of service delivered by ZFS. Interestingly it's a change that might also slo...

CommunityOne slides available -- Multicore Processors & Microparallelism (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Fri May 9 2008) Thanks to everyone that attended my CommunityOne presentation earlier this week. The slides can be downloaded from here (search for Microparallelism) [Username: contentbuilder Password: doc789]-- th...

Sun Fire X4450 SPECjbb World Records (BM Seer)

(Fri May 9 2008) Dave Dagastine's Blog covers Sun's two new SPECjbb2005 World Records on Sun's X64 systems. The Sun Fire X4450, 4-chip Xeon QC CPUs and Java SE 6 Update 6-P, now hold the 4-chip Multi-JVM World Record ...

Configs used for SPECpower_ssj (BM Seer)

(Thu May 8 2008) Yet another SPECpower_ssj of a "different" configuration: tiny memory: ONLY 4GB! low GHZ CPU: only 2.83GHz QC tiny config: only 1 chip! Why do the servers that vendors publish on SPECpower_ssj2008 l...

T2 HW crypto and Java (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu May 8 2008) As stated in an earlier entry, when running on an UltraSPARC T2 processor, applications using the Java cryptographic extensions (JCE) should (when applicable) automatically leverage the on-chip cryp...

Single system world record TPC-H Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Sun and StorageTek 2540 (BM Seer)

(Thu May 8 2008) The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 configured with SPARC VI processors, Sun StorEdge 2540 Arrays, and running Solaris 10 combined with Oracle 11g achieved World Record TPC-H performance of 118,573.3 QphH@...

uperf - opensource network benchmark (fintanr's weblog)

(Wed May 7 2008) I noted that the availability of uPerf, has just been announced over on perf-discuss. I had the opportunity to play with uperf a little bit in my previous role, its an extremely powerful and useful n...

SPECjvm2008 Is Here! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue May 6 2008) SPEC has release SPECjvm2008 and ....Its Free!!The new benchmark is the replacement to SPECjvm98, the first SPEC Java benchmark and the beginning of a family of SPEC Java Benchmarks including SPECjbb2...

uperf - A network benchmark tool (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue May 6 2008) Heard of filebench? Want something similar for networking? Look no further! Today we opensourced uperf, a tool to benchmark networking performance. uperf, just like its cousin filebench,1 is a framew...

Easy Google date range search with dropdown (BM Seer)

(Tue May 6 2008) Want more from google like an easy date-range search dropdown on the main window? Check out this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=HP+benchmark+watts&as_qdr=w&btnG=Search To make this happen...

Sun Java on Intel Delivers Again! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue May 6 2008) Just in time for JavaOne, I'm pleased to announce two new SPECjbb2005 World Records on Sun Intel systems. The Sun Fire X4450, powered by Intel Xeon MP CPUs and Java SE 6 Update 6-P, now hold the 4 Ch...

JDK 6 Update 5-P is Alive! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Mon May 5 2008) I'm pleased to announce the release of our second performance release, JDK 6 Update 5-P. Its available to download at http://java.sun.com/performance. This is our fastest JDK to date, released just ...

T2 HW crypto and SPECweb2005 (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed April 30 2008) I typically witter on about crypto performance at the microbenchmark level, but I was recently browsing the SPECweb05 results and I was impressed to see how the T2 performs, especially on the Bankin...

VMmark performance & watt/performance (BM Seer)

(Wed April 30 2008) Sun continues to show watts on a wide variety of benchmarks, first on UltraSPARC T1, T2, T2 Plus benchmarks on all kinds of SPEC benchmarks that don't require it! ...and Sun extends this to X64 on V...

Multicore slides (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Tue April 29 2008) My slides from Multicore are now available on the OpenSPARC website here. ...

MySQL article in Computer World (BM Seer)

(Mon April 28 2008) New article: "Will Sun rise higher after MySQL deal?" by Cath Jennings http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/25/230456/will-sun-rise-higher-after-mysql-deal.htm...

IBM Power6 pricing - cores configured in systems are very expensive (BM Seer)

(Fri April 25 2008) IBM finally let the truth out about their $70K/core pricing - and it is just as I said. Now you can do your own $/perf analysis. IBM has posted real prices publicly on the web. I've included those l...

IBM funny comparisons... (BM Seer)

(Wed April 23 2008) Just saw this posting on c0t0d0s0: IBM understands the art of nonsensical comparision to perfection. IBM Germany tries to convince the customers, that Sun is extremly expensive. Okay, at first: They u...

Comparing the UltraSPARC T2 Plus to Other Recent SPARC Processors (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly)

(Mon April 21 2008) Update - now the UltraSPARC T2 Plus has been released, and is available in several new several Sun servers. Allan Packer has published a new collection of blog entries that provide lots of detail. ...

Uptime Institute has a whitepaper on Sun MD (Project Blackbox) (BM Seer)

(Fri April 18 2008) The Uptime Institute has a whitepaper called "New Product Review: Self-Contained Computer Room in a Shipping Container from Sun Microsystems". You can find a link to this whitepaper at: http://uptime...

Dtrace with MySQL 6.0.5 - on a Mac (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Thu April 17 2008) For the first time, MySQL includes Dtrace probes in the 6.0 release. On platforms that support Dtrace you can still find out a lot about what's happening, both in the Operating System kernel and in u...

Using Solaris softtoken keystore (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon April 14 2008) The other day I was looking for a C code example of illustrating how to leverage the softtoken key store when directly interacting with the Solaris crypto framework. There's substantial documentatio...

Memory and coherency on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor (UltraSPARC T1 and T2 performance)

(Fri April 11 2008) Coherency Architecture As the name suggests the UltraSPARC T2 Plus is a derivative of the UltraSPARC T2. The vast majority of the layout in silicon of UltraSPARC T2 Plus is t...

Overview of T2 Plus systems (UltraSPARC T1 and T2 performance)

(Thu April 10 2008) Sun on Wednesday launched the next generation of CMT servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. The T2 Plus is the...

CommunityOne and Microparallelism (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu April 10 2008) I have a more detailed presentation on Microparallelism at the upcoming CommunityOne conference (May 5th). Details here. ...

xVM and the art of beer maintenance (fintanr's weblog)

(Thu April 10 2008) We all know global warming is occurring, and from individual's to corporations we can all make a contribution to containing, and eventually reversing climate change, and save a bit of cash along the ...

Java and CMT Triple Crown (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Wed April 9 2008) Java, Solaris and CMT Systems have achieved a Java performance triple crown with winning results in 3 key industry benchmarks. SPECjbb2005 2 CPU Multi-JVM World Record: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 ...

Crypto acceleration on multi-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed April 9 2008) As I've mentioned in previous entries, Sun's latest UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, which are launched today, continue to provide hardware acceleration for a wide variety of important cryptographic o...

Fast! Java on UltraSPARC T2 Plus (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Wed April 9 2008) Today Sun announced the next generation chip multi-threading (CMT) systems with the powerhouse UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor and again Java is ready.  We've spent the last several months optimizin...

Sun's CMT goes multi-chip (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Wed April 9 2008) Sun engineers blog on the new multi-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems Today Sun is announcing new CMT-based systems, hard on the heels of the UltraSPARC T2 systems launched in October 2007 (the Sun SP...

Finding optimization opportunities in MySQL by looking at callstacks (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed April 2 2008) Using callstacks to look at code is very useful. If you are not familiar with callstacks, I suggest you read my earlier blog about it. I was trying to understand the mysql code path using sysbench a...

dtrace.conf(08) (The Observation Deck)

(Sun March 16 2008) dtrace.conf(08) was this past Friday, and (no surprise, given the attendees), it ended up being an incredible (un)conference. DTrace is able to cut across vertical boundaries in the software stack (t...

Link compression (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu March 13 2008) I have an article titled "Memory-Link Compression Schemes: A Value Locality Perspective", that will appear in the June issue of IEEE Transactions on Computers. The article can be found here. ...

Multicore Expo 2008 (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Tue March 11 2008) I'll be presenting at the upcoming Multicore Expo on "Multicore Processors and Microparallelism". The agenda for the conference can be found here. ...

OpenSSL & the T2 Crypto accelerators (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Fri March 7 2008) Interesting blog can be found here on how to simply modify OpenSSL to use the UltraSPARC T2 HW crypto accelerators – assuming, you don't just want to use the version in Solaris 10 that has alr...

A Lesson Learnt with Netbeans 6 and the HTTP Monitor tool (Kim LiChong's blog)

(Wed March 5 2008) Our lab (Benchmarking and Profiling Web2.0 Applications) from JavaONE 2007 is currently being presented at Sun Tech Days. Since then, Netbeans 6 has been released so we had to update the content and ...

My New Role at SPEC (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue March 4 2008)  I have been elected to chair of the SPEC OSG Java Subcommittee, which is responsible for Java benchmarks such as SPECjbb2005, SPECjappserver2004, and SPECjms2007 (plus a few in development).&nbs...

Intel Covers SPECjbb2005 Record Result (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue March 4 2008) Intel has posted a "Chip Shot" about the Sun SPECjbb2005 World Record on Intel systems.  The text is a bit familiar, but heck, its coverage.http://www.intel.com/pressroom/chipshots/chipshots.htmP...

SPECjbb2005 World Records live on SPEC Website (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Fri February 29 2008) The SPECjbb2005 World Record results on Sun Intel systems are now live on the SPEC website.World Record Performance on 2-chip x86 Systems running 4-JVMS: 303,297 SPECjbb2005 bops,  75,824 SPECjbb...

Maximizing Sysbench OLTP performance for MySQL (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue February 26 2008) Maximizing Sysbench OLTP performance for MySQL Sysbench is a popular open source benchmark used to measure performance of various parts of the operating systems and (one) application (da...

Tuning MySQL on Linux (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Tue February 26 2008) In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on...

What's Different about the Sun SPECjbb2005 Result on Intel? (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Fri February 22 2008) Some rather ridiculous comments from "Rick Jones" on the Bmseer's blog prompted me to write this.   Rick stated:"If that four JVM figure wasn't run over and over again, one is left wondering...

SPECjbb2005 World Record Web Coverage (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Thu February 21 2008) Our latest SPECjbb2005 World Record on the Sun Fire X4150 is getting some coverage on Sun web pages and blogs.  As always, the bmseer has something to say, check out his post on the SPECjbb2005 W...

DTraceToolkit in MacOS X (The Wall)

(Mon February 18 2008) Apple included DTrace in MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), released in October 2007. It's great to have DTrace available in MacOS X for its powerful application and kernel performance analysis. To think that ...

Browsable DTraceToolkit (The Wall)

(Sun February 17 2008) Stefan Parvu has created browsable HTML versions of the DTraceToolkit on the DTT test page. See DTraceToolkit ver 0.99 to browse that version. A goal of the DTraceToolkit is to provide documented ex...

Slam! SPECjbb2005 World Record on Intel! (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Fri February 15 2008) It was one year ago that Sun and Intel kicked off a collaboration to optimize Solaris and the HotSpot JVM for Intel Xeon systems.  The last year has been a fun ride, working together we've made o...

Utilization - Can I Have More Accuracy Please? (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly)

(Wed February 13 2008) Just thought I would share another Ruby script - this one takes the output of mpstat, and makes it more like the output of mpstat -a, only the values are floating point. I wrote it to process mpstat...

Survivor Bias (Ariel Hendel)

(Fri January 25 2008) Apropos second generations, our second generation ATCA lineup was announced and it has 10G all over. This Eweek article was printed back in November, but may still be news to readers of my sparse bl...

HTML 5 Draft Spec (fintanr's weblog)

(Wed January 23 2008) Just noted that w3 sent out a press release about HTML 5 yesterday. The draft spec is well worth a look if you are in any way interested in the direction of HTML 5....

Averaging performance data (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Fri January 18 2008) When you are optimizing benchmarks, the typical process involves running the same benchmark N times, and picking an arbitrary run of the benchmark (called a run) from these N runs to get the represent...

17th Irish OpenSolaris Users Group Meeting (fintanr's weblog)

(Fri January 18 2008) Tim have been busy planning the next IE-OSUG meeting Topic News from December/January, Lightning talks & generally being social! Date Thursday January 31st Time 7...

MySQL in Safe Hands (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Thu January 17 2008) Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as...

[ music A bit of trad] (fintanr's weblog)

(Fri January 11 2008) [ cross post from the other side, but its for a good cause ] ... or a blatant plug. A cousin of mine Niamh Ni Charra is playing a showcase gig during the upcoming Temple Bar Trad festival in Dublin....

Fenxi - Performance analysis made easy (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Mon January 7 2008) We just opensourced a nice performance analysis tool called Fenxi. Fenxi is a pluggable Java-based post-processing, performance analysis tool that parses and loads the data from a variety of tools int...

DTrace ip Network Provider (fintanr's weblog)

(Fri December 21 2007) I see that Brendan Gregg has posted a draft PSARC case for the first part of the DTrace Network Provider over on DTrace-discuss. I can't even begin to describe how useful this will be. Technorati ...

Announcing dtrace.conf (The Observation Deck)

(Tue December 18 2007) We on Team DTrace have realized that with so much going on in the world of DTrace -- ports to new systems, providers for new languages and development of new DTrace-based tools -- the time is long ove...

Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Mon December 10 2007) Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs...

Part 4: Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Sun December 9 2007) Click here for the full blog entry....

Part 3: Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Sat December 8 2007) Click here for the full blog entry....

Part 2: Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Fri December 7 2007) Click here for the full blog entry....

Solaris is to UNIX what Mindstorms is to Lego (Multiple Threads)

(Fri December 7 2007) I've now been at Sun for the best part of two decades. It was Solaris and SPARC which first attracted me to Sun, and it's exciting to see both very much alive and kicking all these years on. But t...

Part 1: Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Thu December 6 2007) Click here for the full blog entry....

T2 slideset (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed December 5 2007) Located here...

DTrace and the case of the slow login... (fintanr's weblog)

(Wed December 5 2007) An interesting little problem came my way earlier on today which yet again let me show just how useful DTrace is. Way back when I did a bit of work with a customer around a small webapp they migrated...

Boom/bust cycles (The Observation Deck)

(Wed December 5 2007) Growing up, I was sensitive to the boom/bust cycles endemic in particular industries: my grandfather was a petroleum engineer, and he saw the largest project of his career cancelled during the oil bu...

Easing control.... (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue December 4 2007) APOC, A Point of Control, has just been opensourced. Alberto Ruiz has posted a blog with all the details. Very cool. Take a look at the project website over on FreeDesktop for more details....

Side channel attacks (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu November 29 2007) One interesting benefit of using the UltraSPARC T2 hardware cryptographic accelerators is that many traditional side-channel attacks are impossible. For instance, many cache-based attacks are not f...

IPS @ 16th IE-OSUG (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue November 20 2007) Tim has been busy organising the next Irish OpenSolaris Users Group meeting. The announcement mail is here, but for your ease of viewing.. I'm happy to announce the 16th Irish OpenSolaris User Grou...

Corestat for UltraSPARC T2 (Ravindra Talashikar)

(Mon November 19 2007) Corestat for UltraSPARC T2 : Understanding processor utilization is important for performance analysis and capacity planning. With the launch of UltraSPARC T2 based servers I would like to revisit ...

UltraSPARC T2 AES-128 Kernel Performance (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Wed November 14 2007) In the previous post, the performance of userland offloads was discussed. For a userland offload, the source data is copied from user space to kernel space, and the SPU operates on the kernel-space ...

Out of a long hibernation (Kim LiChong's blog)

(Mon November 12 2007) I've just been awakened from a very very long slumber. My blog has been silent for such a long time, it's been very embarrassing. I have been busy, just not diligent nor active on the blogging front...

On Dreaming in Code (The Observation Deck)

(Sun November 11 2007) As I noted previously, I recently gave a Tech Talk at Google on DTrace. When I gave the talk, I was in the middle of reading Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code, and (for whatever poorly thought-out r...

DTrace on QNX! (The Observation Deck)

(Thu November 8 2007) There are moments in anyone's life that seem mundane at the time, but become pivotal in retrospect: that chance meeting of your spouse, or the job you applied for on a lark, or the inspirational cours...

UltraSPARC IV+ Update (Sun Sensible)

(Tue November 6 2007) Darryl Gove identified a bug with the UltraSPARC IV+ definitions a week ago. Many thanks to Darryl for bringing these to my attention. These are the current definitions to use in .er.rc files: en...

AES-128 Userland Performance (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon November 5 2007) In a previous post, threads offloading to the accelerators were bound to specific cores (i.e. for the 8-thread result, only 1 accelerator was used, 16-threads used 2 accelerators and so on). For the...

Niagara 2 memory throughput according to libMicro (Multiple Threads)

(Fri November 2 2007) libMicro is a portable, scalable microbenchmarking framework which Bart Smaalders and I put together a little while back. It is available to the world via the OpenSolaris website, under the CDDL l...

Comparing the UltraSPARC T2 to Other Recent SPARC Processors (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly)

(Fri November 2 2007) This is now a placeholder. You probably want to read my updated blog on SPARC processor details to get the latest. ...

Visualizing callgraphs via dtrace and ruby (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Thu November 1 2007) The allfrom.d dscript can be used to display all function entry/exits caused by a function call. When call graphs are deep, or long, a visual representation is very helpful to understand the flow as w...

Swapping communities, but still the same community (fintanr's weblog)

(Thu November 1 2007) Among the many great reasons for working in Sun, the ability to forge your own career while working with incredibly talented people has got to be the single best one I can think of. Over the years I ...

DTrace, Leopard, and the business of open source (The Observation Deck)

(Mon October 29 2007) If you haven't seen it, DTrace is now shipping in Mac OS X Leopard. This is very exciting for us here at Sun, but one could be forgiven for asking an obvious question: why? How is having our techno...

Cost-effective crypto offloading (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon October 22 2007) Following from a prior post discussing the benefits of on-chip accelerators, I just wanted to illustrate how rapidly the minimum 'break-even' object size would increase, even for a processor like ...

Marshalling trouble with JRuby/Rails? (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Thu October 18 2007) If you are getting exceptions like the one below with JRuby and Rails, read on for the solution Rendering /tmp/neel/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.5/lib/ action_controller/temp...

Solaris Developer Express on Acer 5613 AWLMi (fintanr's weblog)

(Wed October 17 2007) This post is a bit out of date as there have been several more builds of Solaris Express since I originally started to create this entry, but it should provide a good starting point for anyone with a...

Ruby lovers rejoice! (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Sun October 14 2007) My friend Prashant is working on delivering Ruby into Solaris! I am sure all Ruby lovers really appreciate your efforts Prashant! I no longer have to download and compile Ruby (or alternatively, insta...

CMT Comes Of Age (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Thu October 11 2007) Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systems [ Update Jan 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers were awarded Product of the Year 2007. ] Sun launched the Chip-L...

UltraSPARC T2 Features for DProfile (Sun Sensible)

(Thu October 11 2007) This week Sun released new UltraSPARC T2 based systems. UltraSPARC T2 enhances support for DProfile by adding cache miss reporting, as the next phase of constant improvement to DProfile. Perform...

Detailed UltraSPARC T2 RSA performance (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu October 11 2007) Interesting to note that: 1) The UltraSPARC can hit the HW peak accelerator performance with the majority of the threads idle, allowing other useful work to be conducted while the RSA operations are...

UltraSPARC T2 crypto performance outstrips traditional processors (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu October 11 2007) Comparing the crypto performance of a 2-socket quad core against a single socket UltraSPARC T2 processor shows the very significant performance advance this CMT processor has over more traditional p...

Sizing UltraSPARC T2 Servers (Allan Packer's Weblog)

(Wed October 10 2007) The newly released Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 present an interesting challenge to the end user: how do you deploy a system that looks like an entry level server ...

How to evaluate the performance of the heavily threaded UltraSPARC T2 multicore processor? (Ruud's Weblog)

(Tue October 9 2007) Some time ago I had the pleasure to have access to an early engineering system with the UltraSPARC T2 processor. I used this opportunity to run my private PEAS (Performance Evaluation Application Suit...

A Beef with Darwin (Ariel Hendel)

(Tue October 9 2007) A special post indeed in this series of amorphous blogs initially inspired by CMT topics. The arrival of second generation CMT systems (the T5120 and family) is a critical evolutionary step, and a goo...

Floating Point performance on the UltraSPARC T2 processor (UltraSPARC T1 and T2 performance)

(Tue October 9 2007) UtraSPARC T1 Floating Point Performance The first generation of CMT processor, the UltraSPARC T1, had a single floating point unit shared between 8 cores. This tradeoff was made to keep...

T5120 and T5220 system overview (UltraSPARC T1 and T2 performance)

(Tue October 9 2007) Sun today launches the new line of servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor. The T2 processor is the next generation of CMT following on from the very successful UltraSPARC T1...

Lesons learned from T1 (UltraSPARC T1 and T2 performance)

(Tue October 9 2007) We created UltrSPARC T1 and launched it into the world in November 2005. Adoption was slow at the start as CMT was so different. We spent many hours explaining patiently how it worked to customers, ...

US-T2 and HotSpot JVM: An Example of Scalability (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue October 9 2007) Single JVM scaling has been ignored in the realm of competitive benchmarking.  Since the release of SPECjbb2005 and its support for multiple JVM configurations most JVM and hardware vendors have ...

Java Screams on Sun UltraSPARC T2 (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Tue October 9 2007) The UltraSPARC T2 has arrived and the Sun HotSpot JVM is ready.  We've spent the last several months optimizing Sun's JVM for US-T2 and the day has finally come to share what we've been working o...

DTraceToolkit ver 0.99 (The Wall)

(Fri October 5 2007) I've released DTraceToolkit ver 0.99 - a major release. If you haven't encountered it before, the DTraceToolkit is a collection of opensource scripts for:solving various troubleshooting and performanc...

Why on-chip accelerators? (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu October 4 2007) In comparison to using onchip crypto accelerators, the use of offchip, look-aside, accelerators, will tend to increase CPU utilization, consume additional I/O bandwidth and introduce additional late...

Now what's the chance of that? (Multiple Threads)

(Fri September 28 2007) "Congratulations, you have been randomly selected to win a free all accommodation included vacation to Florida Bahamas. Press 9 for more information." How lucky am I?! I received this automated...

Ldoms @ IE-OSUG (fintanr's weblog)

(Thu September 20 2007) The fourteenth Irish OpenSolaris Users Group meeting is on next Tuesday. Liam Merwick will be presenting on Logical Domains. If you have any machines with Coolthreads technology, this will definately...

Sun HotSpot JVM Talk at Intel IDF (David Dagastine's Weblog)

(Wed September 19 2007) I'll be presenting tomorrow at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco with an esteemed colleague from Intel, Kingsum Chow.The session is SSGS003:  "How to Get the Most Performance from Sun* JVM* ...

ZFS ARC Statistics (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue September 18 2007) ARC Statistics are exported via kstat(1M) (CR 6510807) in Solaris 10 U4 and Solaris nevada (build 57+). A simple way to see them is to use kstat -m zfs. I wrote a simple perl script to print out t...

Back again (Ruud's Weblog)

(Mon September 17 2007) Unfortunately it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to pick this up again. I'll try to behave better in the future and certainly have lots of ideas and plans for topics to blog about. One of t...

Good overview of the UltraSPARC T2 processor (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Mon September 17 2007) Good article on the UltraSPARC T2 processor located here. ...

Simple example of using RSA acceleration from OpenSSL (Lawrence Spracklen's Blog)

(Thu September 13 2007) In the OpenSSL demos/sign subdirectory there is a simple demo code (sign.c), that signs and verifies a short message, leveraging RSA. The modifications required in order to offload the RSA operati...

Stream and the performance impact of compiler optimization (fintanr's weblog)

(Thu September 13 2007) Introduction A couple of weeks back there was a discussion on the perf-discuss alias over on opensolaris.org around memory bandwidth/throughput benchmarks, and as is customary in such a discussion st...

Taking UFS new places safely with ZFS zvols (Multiple Threads)

(Tue September 11 2007) I've just read a couple of intriguing posts which discuss the possibility of hosting UFS filesystems on ZFS zvols. I mean, who in their right mind...? The story goes something like this ... # zfs ...

Let's have a lunchtime pint to celebrate! (Multiple Threads)

(Tue September 11 2007) At last, some good news here. ...

DTrace on ONTAP? (The Observation Deck)

(Thu September 6 2007) As presumably many have seen, NetApp is suing Sun over ZFS. I was particularly disturbed to read Dave Hitz's account, whereby we supposedly contacted NetApp 18 months ago requesting that they pay us ...

How Event-Driven Utilization Measurement is Better than Sample-Based (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly)

(Fri August 31 2007) ...and how to measure both at the same time With the delivery of Solaris 10, Sun made two significant changes to how system utilization is measured. One change was to how CPU utilisation is measur...

Driving towards efficient performance (End of Line)

(Tue August 21 2007) For the most part, and especially with respect to data center class server systems, driving the performance component of the price : performance ratio has been our focus. But the economics of the indu...

DTrace at Google (The Observation Deck)

(Tue August 21 2007) Recently, I gave a Tech Talk at Google on DTrace, the video for which is now online. If you've seen me present before and you don't want to suffer through the same tired anecdotes, arcane jokes, and ...

Quick grab of L2-Cache sizes on x64 for stream (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue August 21 2007) One of the benchmarks we run on a regular basis is stream, which needs you to set up some feasible values based on the size of your L2 cache. Following a recent discussion over on perf-discuss I fig...

DTrace for #!/bin/sh (fintanr's weblog)

(Tue August 14 2007) Now this is seriously handy - Alan Hargreaves has released a DTrace provider for sh over on opensolaris.org. No more hiding under the excuse "its the shell" - bad shell scripts will now be exposed :)...

Ali G and Kanazawa on UltraSPARC T2 (nee Niagara 2) (Ariel Hendel)

(Tue August 7 2007) With the announcement of the UltraSPARC T2 processor it is time to spare you my tired words on life, technology, and the pursuit of happiness, and defer to two great video guests: Hirokasu Kanazawa an...

DProfile - UltraSPARC T2 Support In Studio 12 Performance Analyzer (Sun Sensible)

(Tue August 7 2007) Today, Sun announced the first true system on a chip with 64 available threads of computation. Sun Studio 12 adds DProfile support for UltraSPARC T2. Activating UltraSPARC T2 objects in Performan...

Caught on camera (The Observation Deck)

(Thu August 2 2007) Software is such an abstract domain that it is rare for a photograph to say much. But during his recent trip to OSCON, Adam snapped a photo that actually says quite a bit. For those who are curious, ...

13th Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting (fintanr's weblog)

(Thu August 2 2007) Tim has been busy organising the next Irish OpenSolaris users group meeting - To: [ug-ieosug] 13th Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting From: Tim Foster Tim.Foster at Sun.COM Date: Wed Aug 1 08:42...

On the beauty in Beautiful Code (The Observation Deck)

(Sat July 28 2007) I finished Beautiful Code this week, and have been reflecting on the book and its development. In particular, I have thought back to some of the authors' discussion, in which some advocated a differe...

OpenSolaris Scheduling and CPU Management at SVOSUG tonight (End of Line)

(Thu July 26 2007) Tonight i'll be presenting at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group meeting. I'll be giving an overview of the OpenSolaris dispatcher, scheduling classes, processor abstractions and management too...