I know my blog has been very quiet since April and people have been wondering, just where is Octave? Well I'm working at Oracle as a Director of Enterprise Architecture! Without a doubt this has been an amazing year for me and I'm very excited about this position at Oracle. At Oracle OpenWorld 2011, I presented at the session "Getting the Most out of Oracle VM Server for SPARC", where I talked about the new SPARC T4 servers, what's new with LDoms, and how SPARC can be used in your cloud deployments. There are soo many exciting things going on at Oracle around cloud computing, Solaris, SPARC, virtualization, etc.
There is soo much I want to talk about and I will do my best to bring new content to my blog. If there are topics you'd like to see me make posts on, leave a comment below!
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Fujitsu Launches PRIMEHPC FX10 Super Computer
As if Fujitsu didn't surprise the industry enough with the K Computer being the #1 super computer on the Top500 list, they have announced an even faster platform, the PRIMEHPC FX-10!
When I was at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, I had a chance to take a look at the SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz nodes that are used in the K Computer:
The really interesting thing about this server is the water cooling and of course the performance. Sadly, Fujitsu is using Linux on this server and the PRIMEHPC FX10 super computer. The PRIMEHPC FX10 super computer uses a derivative processor called the SPARC64 IXfx which runs at 1.848GHz and has 16 cores that provides 236.5 GFLOPs of performance. A fully loaded PRIMEHPC FX10 will provide 23,248 TFLOPs with 1024 nodes!
All in all, very impressive to SPARC at the top after all these years! With what Oracle has done with the SPARC T4 processor and what Fujitsu is doing on the high-end, there is a renaissance for the SPARC architecture.
Solaris 11 Released!
Finally after all of these years in the works, Solaris 11 has been released! Check out the below links:
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time and I'm really happy that it has been released finally. The announcement today was full of lots of information that many in the OpenSolaris space already knew would come. However, there are many pleasant surprises for everyone. Here's a quick summary from the "What's New" document:
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time and I'm really happy that it has been released finally. The announcement today was full of lots of information that many in the OpenSolaris space already knew would come. However, there are many pleasant surprises for everyone. Here's a quick summary from the "What's New" document:
- Better Auto-Installer
- More configuration files migrated into SMF (/etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/nodename, /etc/defaultdomain, /etc/default/init, etc.)
- New sysconfig command replaces the old sys-unconfig and sysidtool commands
- Integrated p2v and v2v tools for migrating Solaris 10 machines to Solaris 11 Zones
- NFS Server in a Zone!!
- Crossbow and Zones Integrated!
- RBAC based administrative controls for Zone administration
- Enhanced ZFS support for Zone Boot Environments
- Immutable Zones replaces Sparse Root Zones
- Clean Shutdowns for Zones
- zonestat tool and libraries for monitoring Zones
- Root account is just a role now as it should be!
- TPM Support in Trusted Extensions
- Labeled IPSec reduces the number of physical network links and maintains security
- More security and cryptographic enhancements to make Solaris 11 the most secure OS
- X.509 certificate support for Solaris SSH
- Tons of features around Crossbow
- netadm and netcfg control SMF services for network configuration
- Default vanity naming for NIC interfaces
- dladm can make MAC address changes persistent across reboots!
- Infiniband enhancements for TCP/IP to support SD and RDMA for performance
- VLAN IDs are now broadcasted over VNICs to enable dynamic network reconfiguration
- llpdadm command enables control of LLPD support on networks
- New Socket architecture replaces the old STREAMS framework
- Load balancer, bridging, and tunneling are finally included!
- Link protection for VMs to prevent bad things from happening on your networks!
- dlstat give you link observation stats. Plus netcat and wireshark is included for indepth analysis.
- IPMP enhancements with ipadm, simpler configuration, better probing options, and SMF service
- ProFTPd replaces the old WU-ftpd
- tcp, udp, and ip providers for Dtrace!
- ZFS Encryption included, but not for the root pool :(
- ZFS deduplication included!
- ZFS shadow datasets for migrating data
- ZFS backups with NDMP with support for snapshots and clones!
- ZFS datasets can now be mounted temporarily in alternate locations
- ZFS sends can now be recursive to descendents!
- ZFS diffs for showing what has changed between snapshots
- NFSv4 support for alerting clients of when a file system has been migrated!
- Built-int CIFS server replaces Samba, FINALLY! Integrated with ZFS for ACL support for Windows
- DTrace providers for SMB and iSCSI protocols
- COMSTAR framework integrated to provide FC, FCoE, iSCSI, iSER, and Infiniband SRP protocol support. Enables you to turn your Solaris server into a storage array!
- DTrace probes for COMSTAR SCSI STMF and SBD
- SPARC T4 support and optimizations, Surprise!
- Critical Threads support in kernel to enable faster performance on newer CPUs
- SR-IOV support to enhance virtualization, FINALLY!
- NUMA I/O Support!
- Intel AVX Support
- Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory enhancements with 8x performance gains get those Oracle Databases up faster!
- Suspend and Resume on RAM for certain platforms
- Enhanced FMA support in x86
- DTrace cpc provider for CPU profiling
- Tons of open source software in the IPS repository
- Xorg with Gnome 2.30.2 and stable with Firefox 6, Thunderbird 6, etc. Compviz support for fancy eyecandy!
- GNU and BSDisms integrated into /usr/bin and /usr/gnu/bin
- Bash is the default shell with ksh93 being the default system shell
- HAL and DBus replace the old vold framework for removeable media
- Open Sound System API replaces old sound framework
- Enhancements for the old Man Pages with search strings and an SMF service to build your indexes! No more manual catman jobs!
- Virtual Console support, FINALLY!
- Time Slider tool for managing ZFS snapshots of home directories, enables easy backups and restores for users
- ZFS SMF service for automating snapshots
- CUPS replaces the old LPR print system, FINALLY!
- LibC enhancements to support compatibility with Linux and BSD
- path.h included to help developers with knowing common paths in Solaris for application development
- Over 200 Locales supported, without a doubt the best cross locale support out there
- Enhanced True Type fonts
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