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Sun Wins Top Tech Innovation Award

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-with-hardware dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Sun's DTrace trouble-shooting software won top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It's the second time in three years that Sun took the top award. From the article, which also names a dozen other winners: 'Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.'"

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm. by jd · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    I'm not 100% sure it's a good idea to have the application run in parallel to the analyzer in a production environment. Because the analyzer must have total access to the code and data spaces of the application, any bug in the analyzer could really ruin somebody's day.


    However, inline analyzers have existed. Intel's VTune is clunky, limited in supported architectures but useful where it applies. Parallel developers might well use DAKOTA and KOJAK to do the same for MPI applications, which traditional analyzers can't handle at all. I also would not advise anyone to just use analyzers. You would be wise to monitor events - there are patches for Linux, such as evlog, which give you very flexible event logging. Linux also provides the ability to monitor all kinds of other statistics - either as standard or through patches such as Web100 (for the network) or LTT-ng (for profiling).


    Does this mean I think Sun don't deserve the award? I've not used that tool, so I'm not in a position to say. It would have to do a lot in addition to basic analysis to earn the right to be innovative, never mind the title of "top technical innovation". If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux. If it can't, then all I can say is that the competition must've sucked this year.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:Hmmm. by jd · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Which only reinforces my opinion that Sun's software is not innovative. It might be wonderful, it might be a lot of things, but from what I've seen and what you say innovative it is not.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  2. Wall St giving out tech awards? WTF? by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    What next? The Walt Disney award for OS development?

    Wall St is packed with accountants and tie-wearing beancounter types isn't it? A tech award from them would surely be an insult to any true geek!

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.