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Sun Reconsidering Solaris 9 for x86
jeffphil writes "This article reports that Sun is meeting with a group of Solaris x86 users called the 'Secret Six.' The group was created to convince Sun to re-examine its previous decision to cancel Solaris on the x86 platform."
You might be surprised. Pixar Studios, for example, uses Sun Enterprise 10000 machines for rendering their movies (so I was told this 6 months ago by one of their chief animators). Those max out at 106 processors per box, and Pixar has over 3000 CPU's. Do the math to figure out how many boxes that is. And maybe such a conversation did indeed take place:
Mr. Smithers, get the CTO in here right now. Our animators say that Monster, Inc. is going to take another 3 months to render. Get some more of those 106-processor Sun boxes right now!
Finally, to those who wonder why they don't use clusters instead of SMP machines? Pixar's rendering software algorithms are optimized for fine-grained communication patterns and simply would not work on a message-passing cluster.
I am pretty sure that a company I used to work for, NCR, is one of the six. They build and sell really big MPP database servers. They need an extremely reliable and _trusted_ OS to run on these servers (which run in a loosely coupled configuration -- remember MTBF is the product of the MTBF of all the parts) and they don't want to support their own flavor of *nix just for their own niche product. In their particular market, telling customers that they run these special, expensive, multi-terabyte databases on linux is not gonna cut it. Solaris for x86 is just the ticket for them. I believe that they have customers running solaris 8 for x86 so SUN's decision to back away from this OS really puts NCR (and potentially their customers) in a bind.
Have a NICE day.
...at least according to all the tests I've seen.