Wintellog

Wintellog: "reseaching new Windows Vista features that affect threading such as I/O cancellation, wait chain traversal, logical processor information, I/O priorities, transactional file system and registry, and more. "

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA: "plans with in memory"

Sun Is Setting: Fool by Numbers - Yahoo! News

Sun Is Setting: Fool by Numbers - Yahoo! News: "The cash balance has certainly improved, but not by positive cash flows from operations. Over the past year, Sun has converted $4.2 billion of its long-term investments to cash, leaving only $700 million on that line. At least the company hasn't resorted to large secondary offerings."

Nintendo | Playing a different game | Economist.com

Nintendo | Playing a different game | Economist.com: "IF TALK of synergistic processing elements, parallel floating-point shader pipelines, vector units and 1080p high-definition video sets your pulse racing, you are probably looking forward to the launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3), Sony's new video-game console, which goes on sale in Japan and America next month.
Most people find such technical trivia baffling, however. As a result, the video-games industry's relentless pursuit of ever more computing power and graphical detail might ultimately prove counterproductive. "

Press Releases

Press Releases: "AMD plans to create a new class of x86 processor that integrates the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level with a broad set of design initiatives collectively codenamed “Fusion.” AMD intends to design Fusion processors to provide step-function increases in performance-per-watt relative to today’s CPU-only architectures, and to provide the best customer experience in a world increasingly reliant upon 3D graphics, digital media and high-performance computing. With Fusion processors, AMD will continue to promote an open platform and encourage companies throughout the ecosystem to create innovative new co-processing solutions aimed at further optimizing specific workloads. AMD-powered Fusion platforms will continue to fully support high-end discrete graphics, physics accelerators, and other PCI Express-based solutions to meet the ever-increasing needs of the most demanding enthusiast end-users.

“With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life,” said Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer. “In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaFLOPS, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond.” "

Outlook Series | Kirk Skaugen: Intel Opens Up Server Acceleration Technology

Outlook Series | Kirk Skaugen: Intel Opens Up Server Acceleration Technology: "“Intel QuickData Technology is a platform solution that addresses the computing overhead and system level bottlenecks associated with TCP/IP based communication as opposed to TCP Offload Engines which only address part of the problem,” said Michael Kagan, vice president of architecture, Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox is embracing Intel QuickData Technology and will implement support for the technology in our adapters that will seamlessly fit into the total platform solution to accelerate TCP/IP communication.”"

Sun begins work on Niagara 3 chip | CNET News.com

Sun begins work on Niagara 3 chip | CNET News.com: "Niagara 2 doubles the total number of threads from 32 to 64 by supporting eight threads in each of its eight cores. "

: "perfmon2 interface for Linux"

redhat.com | Red Hat speaks

redhat.com | Red Hat speaks: "There are several other performance monitoring tools (Oprofile, valgrind, perfmon, strace, etc.) that are being worked on by Red Hat. Oprofile is one tool that required considerable work to function properly on all of the different architectures. This tool helps identify performance problems such as TLB misses, stalls, memory references, etc. One of the goals of the SystemTap project is to provide an integrated performance platform where all of these projects and future ones can be integrated. "

Cray, Sun, IBM support AMD's Torrenza platform | TG Daily

Cray, Sun, IBM support AMD's Torrenza platform | TG Daily: "Torrenza will provide direct access to an AMD64-based processor via a Hypertransport link. According to AMD, the technology will allow third party hardware developer to integrate their own silicon into a spare socket on a Torrenza motherboard and combine their technology with an AMD Opteron or Athlon CPU. Conceivably, this socket could house co-processors - so-called 'accelerators' - that focus on specialized applications such as physics, floating-point calculations, storage or graphics"

AMD's Winning Ways Underappreciated [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] October 19, 2006

AMD's Winning Ways Underappreciated [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] October 19, 2006: "And while we're on the subject of margins, AMD is installing more 300-mm wafer facilities to replace the old 200-mm tools, which should increase output and lower manufacturing costs significantly. In addition, the move from 90-nm to 65-nm technology is underway, with the first 65-nm products shipping this quarter, both from its own factories and from manufacturing partner Chartered Semiconductor. Smaller chip traces mean more chips per wafer -- again increasing manufacturing efficiencies -- as well as cooler, lower-power operation. These attributes are proving more attractive than raw processing power these days, especially to corporate customers who need to power and cool data centers that house thousands of processors."

Official Linden Blog

Official Linden Blog: "So, here’s what’s different under the hood: we’ve been all-AMD for years, but are moving from the Opteron 270 to the Intel Xeon 5148 - a low-power version of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo based server CPUs. This gives us better performance for fewer watts, while supporting our standard 64-bit OS image. We’ve also doubled the RAM per machine from 2GB to 4GB and moved to a faster SATA disk, which usually won’t make much of a difference, but should reduce the stalls sometimes seen by heavy regions during autosaves. Finally, there are fewer, bigger system fans, and power supply efficiency goes from 67% to 84%; power usage while running the sim process is about 175 watts, vs. 230 for a Class 4."

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers: "Solaris zones have virtually no overhead. Sun ran has audited results on the SAP-SD benchmark using Solaris 10 on the Sun Fire T2000. "

The Clingan Zone

The Clingan Zone: " implementation is neither like VMWare/VirtualPC nor IBM Mainframes. VMWare/Virtual PC emulate hardware. IBM's LPAR abstract out the hardware but you are running essentially in a virtual machine. Zones are lighter weight, much more scalable and are a good choice for application consolidation. Both of the above virtual machine models require a running operating system per virtual machine. This is quite a bit of overhead. Solaris zones do not run a seperate instance of an operating system. From a developer (and to a lesser degree administrator) perspective it feels like its own seperate Solaris instance, but there is really only one instance of Solaris running."

James Gosling: on the Java Road

James Gosling: on the Java Road: "To get the best CPU utilization the apps have to be written to be multithreaded on a cluster node, and use MPI between nodes. This is the worst of both worlds because you have to architect for threading and clustering at the same time. This is pretty straightforward in the Java world because we have great threading facilities, but folks with bags of Fortran code have trouble (auto-parallelizing matrix code doesn't help nearly enough).
This is (almost) a non-issue for folks writing enterprise applications using the JavaEE frameworks because the containers deal with both threading and clustering"

/~colmmacc/ � Blog Archive � Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown

/~colmmacc/ � Blog Archive � Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown: "Sun�s own benchmarks have quoted up to 2500 requests per second, which we didn�t find particularly impressive. Our current box - merely a dual Itanium - can do 2700 requests per-second without much trouble. "

Sun Unveils the Future of Virtualized Datacenters - Project Blackbox: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Sun Unveils the Future of Virtualized Datacenters - Project Blackbox: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "Project Blackbox starts from the world's most broadly adopted industry standard, the shipping container, and asks -- how can we most efficiently create modular, lights-out datacenters from this base? The answer? With one-hundredth of the initial cost, one-fifth the cost per square foot, and with 20 percent more power efficiency, we can deliver an immense multiple of capacity and capability -- anywhere on earth.'"
Sun Link

Sun Microsystems Revamps 'Galaxy' Line of Sun Fire(Tm) Servers: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Sun Microsystems Revamps 'Galaxy' Line of Sun Fire(Tm) Servers: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "Sun Fire X4000 Server Family Powered by Next-Generation AMD Opteron(TM) Processors Are Fastest, Most Scalable and Energy-Efficient Enterprise x64 Systems on the Market "

Google projected to earn 25% of annual online ad revenue - Oct. 17, 2006

Google projected to earn 25% of annual online ad revenue - Oct. 17, 2006: "The online ad giant is projected to take home $4 billion of the expected $16 billion US market, according to eMarketer, an online marketing research company."

ASPCA: ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs

ASPCA: ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs: "ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs"

Steve’s Q3’2006 Sabbatical

Completed a 15 day paddle trip "down canyon" – taking small paddle boats on the Colorado River thru the Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek – for a total of 225 miles. Used the outfitter CanyonX, who I highly recommend.


Figure 1: Our little rafts at a camp … boats were about 14 feet long and has 6 paddlers & one guide who does the steering from the rear..

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA: "SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA "