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Sun community licensing High Performance Cluster Software
Anonymous writes "Sun just announced that they are open sourcing their
high-performance clustering software." The announcement is on Yahoo. Sun will be releasing it under their Sun Community Source Licensing, which is different then XFS, which was truly Open Sourced.
I'm not going back. I like things the way they are now.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I know that some of the confusion is the original story submitters, and some comes from Hemos' comments, but it's at times like this that I think the term Open Source is just as confusing as Free Software. People look at something where the source is available, and ask themselves, isn't this open source? In both cases, the words don't mean quite what they look like. Something that has available source code isn't necessarily Open Source; something that is no cost isn't necessarily Free Software. I don't see how the new phrase we have all adopted has cleared much up at all. What we're really after is source code we can modify, redistribute, not just read. Witness this Sun Community license as an example of where that confusion can come back to haunt us.
--
Ian Peters
you can't expect every company on the planet to completely give up control of their technology. how much do you think sun spent on making their clustering solution, which has availability features as well as distributed processing features. (read some later posts)
The benefits of sun making this code public outweigh whatever bruce perens thinks about whatever. If the other UNIX companies follow would follow suit it would be a real victory for *our side*. (our side being customers, administrators, and users. not techno evangelists, ceo's, stock holders, or "religious fanatics".)
The truth is that the commercial unix people who have spent huge sums of money on making the Solaris's and AIX's of the world what they are today. They should move to a community development model so that they could compete in the commodity business of server software that is already here. It irks me that as Linux became more popular you started seeing the long time open source people calling it GNU/linux and the like. The success of linux is the validation of some of their ideas, not of them or their agendas.
It's all about usable software in the hands of users. The rest of this is pointless.
Let's cross our fingers real hard and hope Internic fixes my host record today. My darned DSL provider went out of business, and unfortunately I was doing all of my own DNS (yes, I know, I'm stupid), and now all of my host and domain records point to /dev/null.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Regarding Apple-bashing, Apple very nicely incorporated all of the points that the Debian folks and I raised into version 1.1 of their APSL license. Whoever was Apple-bashing, it wasn't us. We had constructive criticism, and Apple responded to it. The press saw it as an attack, but they weren't used to free software issues.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Please fix this article. "Sun Community Source" isn't Open Source - I think you went over their press release too fast. It's also not the same license that SGI used on XFS. SGI's license appears to be Open Source and they are being a lot nicer to the community than Sun.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Ok, for clarity:
SGI is releasing XFS under some yet-to-be-disclosed open source license
Sun is releasing some HPC stuff under their "Community License." Sun has not claimed anywhere that this constitutes "Open Source." "Open Source" is not mentioned anywhere in their press release.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I'm pleased to see Sun providing source for more products. Albeit they are not using the GNU license, the fact is that their products are becoming more open to peer review. The goal isn't for the GNU license to pervade the software cycle completely. It has influenced it in a positive way, and the progress is exciting.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
This is high performance clustering like Beowulf. Linux needs high reliability clustering, which this is not.
btw, Sun's SCSL is aimed more at commercial developers (including Sun's OEMs) and researchers, not so much general members of the public. However, they are releasing quite a bit of stuff under the SCSL - Java, Jini, HotSpot (later this year), their SPARC processors and several other software products. They seems to be SCSL'ing their products in general. They haven't said much about SCSL'ing Solaris recently - the last time it was brought up they said it would be quite hard to do, because of all the liscences.
I suppose there will be inevitable comparisons between Beowulf and Sun's HPC software, and SMP kit. The main hardware difference is bandwidth and latency - Beowulf seems more about combining lots of single CPU (or low CPU count, eg 1-4) boxes in a network, possibly having several hundred of such boxes. Sun's approach to high end computing is to have big SMP boxes (a single Starfire E10000 can take 64 UltraSparcs) with the option of clustering a few of them - currently limited to 4, ie 256 processors. A Starfire has a 6Gbyte/s I/O bus and 15Gbyte/s main memory bus, which is rather better than Ethernet. Sun's approach is more expensive, but it also solves a wider class of problems well. For some things (eg cracking codes, rendering) you don't need much interprocess communication or bandwidth, so it scales well with Beowulf, but for other things (some kinds of database operations, eg OLAP, and data intensive scientific calculations) you really need very high bandwidth and very low latency (close to main memory speeds) which is where Beowulf doesn't do so well. Still, some things don't scale so well, even on a Starfire... Btw, the Starfire is over 2 years old.
Cue Sun's next gen super-computer, codename Serengheti, which has a completely different architecture. It's memory architecture is called Cache Only Memory Architecture (COMA), which seems to have been in development for a long long time at Sun. A single box will take 128 processors, and you'll be able to cluster 8 of them, for a total of 1024 processors. It'll be powered by Sun's UltraSparc-III, which recently reached first silicion, and has b ooted on Solaris. Incidentaly, the UltraSparc-III has hardware support for 1024 processors, and is supposed to be out in volume production by the end of the year. However, Serengheti won't be out until about the 2nd half of 2000.
It is worth pointing out once more that this DOES NOT mean that Linux will get any benefit from this development.
The Sun Community Source License allows you to see the source, but does not allow general free use or redistribution. This is not some picky "Oh it's not GPL, Ah it is not fully Open Source (TM)" point. It just isn't a free use or free redistribution license. It allows for research use, paid-for commercial use, and redistribution only among existing licensees.
The release has technical interest, and I'm happy that Sun have done it for reasons other than to give a false impression of contributing free software, but it's of little use to most of us. It's only of use to Sun platform developers and academics. It may be very good news to Sun's customers using the affected products.