UT and Sun to build Opteron-based Supercomputer

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 29, 2006

The University of Texas’ Advanced Computing Center has been awarded a contract worth $59 million dollars to build a supercomputer based around Sun equipment:

TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 trillion bytes (terabytes) of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek™ disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processors. It will be housed in TACC’s new building on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas.

Solaris on Itanium (sort of)

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 27, 2006

The Register has an article about Solaris/SPARC binaries running on Itanium-based systems from Fujitsu using software from Transitive, who have a press release up as well:

“The demonstration runs on an eight-way Hitachi BladeSymphony platform with a Dual-Core Intel Itanium Series 9000 processor, with QuickTransit virtualization technology enabling unmodified Solaris/SPARC binaries to run alongside native Linux applications.”

Transitive’s “QuickTransit” product is also the basis for Apple’s “Rosetta” PowerPC G4 translation software for Intel-based Macintosh systems.

Sun acquires NeoGent

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 27, 2006

Sun has acquired Austin, Texas-based NeoGent. From the press release:

“The combination of Sun’s market-leading identity management solutions with Neogent’s deployment automation toolset will help Sun enterprise customers dramatically improve identity management implementation times while reducing implementation costs, as well as better address compliance requirements for regulatory, security and privacy issues such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPPA), Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.”

New Sun systems released

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 13, 2006

The Ultra 25 is a desktop workstation featuring a 1.34Ghz UltraSPARC-IIIi processor with 1M of L2 cache, dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and up to 8G of ECC DDR memory. The system holds up to four SATA or SAS drives.

The Sun Fire v215 is a 1U rackmount server with quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, up to two 1.5Ghz UltraSPARC-IIIi processors (1M L2 cache each), two 73G SAS drives, and 16G of ECC DDR SDRAM memory.

The Sun Fire v245 is the 2U rackmount version of the v215, holding up to four 73G SAS drives but otherwise having identical specifications.

The Sun Fire v445 is a 4U rackmount server with quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two (upgradeable to four) 1.6Ghz UltraSPARC-IIIi processors (1M L2 cache each), eight 73 SAS disk drives, and up to 32G of ECC DDR SDRAM memory.

The Netra T2000 is the carrier-grade version of Sun’s Sun Fire T2000 “CoolThreads” UltraSPARC T1-based server, while the Netra CP3060 is Sun’s first server blade featuring the UltraSPARC T1 processor.

“S1” CPU designs now available

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 13, 2006

SimplyRISC’s open-source “S1” CPU design based on the UltraSPARC T1 is now available on SunSource.

DTrace wins WSJ Technology Innovation Award

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 12, 2006

Sun’s DTrace has won the top award in the Wall Street Journal‘s 2006 Technology Innovation Awards.

I need your pictures of Sun equipment!

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 8, 2006

Now that Sun has blocked off most of the System Handbook from people without a support contract, I’m in the process of creating a free equivalent from publicly-available information that won’t violate any of their copyrights.

One part of that, though, will be system pictures. I can’t legally re-use pictures from SunSolve, so I need your pictures (front/back/sides/top/bottom/open) of Sun equipment! If you’d like to contribute, mail the pictures to pictures@sunhelp.org.

Preferrably, your pictures need to be available under a Public-Domain-equivalent, Creative Commons, or GNU Free Documentation license so that they can be freely shared.

Single-core OpenSPARC-based CPU released

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 8, 2006

According to this LinuxDevices article, SimplyRISC engineers have created a freely-available single-core implementation of Sun’s OpenSPARC T1 processor design.

Sun hires JRuby developers

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 7, 2006

According to Tor Norbye, Sun has hired the primary JRuby developers. Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo will now be paid to work on JRuby full-time.

Charles Nutter’s weblog entry tells about it, and Tim Bray has more details.

Niagara II System Architecture Detailed

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 6, 2006

RealWorldTech has a good article by David Kanter that goes over the upcomng Niagara II chip’s system architecture in good detail.

John Doerr leaving Sun’s board of directors

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 6, 2006

John Doerr is stepping down from Sun’s board of directors in early November in order to spend more time with his family.

Sun bundles NetBeans and JBoss

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 6, 2006

Sun, along with Red Hat, has announced the availability of an installer program for the NetBeans IDE bundled with the JBoss Application Server. The installer is available for Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

OpenSPARC T1 v1.3 Released

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 2, 2006

Version 1.3 of the OpenSPARC T1 processor design and specification has been released. Simulator executables have been added for Solaris 10 x86-64 and Linux x86, as well as source code for the OpenBoot PROM (OBP).

Sun cancels UltraSPARC-IIIi+

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 1, 2006

Sun has cancelled its upcoming UltraSPARC-IIIi+ chip, in favor of the UltraSPARC-IV and Niagara 1/2 processors.