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Sun community licensing High Performance Cluster Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sure-you-can-have-this-too dept.

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.

1 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Some points by ChrisRijk · · Score: 4
    As just about everyone has said, Sun's SCSL is not 'open source' (tm), nor does it try to be. XFS is not by Sun either, it's by SGI. Here is an linuxworld article about what liscence XFS will use - basically, the SGI guy wants to GPL it, if the lawyers will let him. (not bad, eh!) However they don't discuss other OSs - (I hope XFS won't be just for Linux). However, from what I've heard, XFS was designed assuming 64bit address space, so you might (initially) only be able to use it on Alpha, SPARC and MIPS versions of Linux. XFS uses file journaling and logging - read here for about this, from a SunWorld article about Solaris file-systems, which is pretty general.

    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.