"Intel has had Hyperthreading available in Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs for a couple of years now, which does exactly what the article is talking about"
You are wrong. Period. Sun's CMT is several independent CPU cores on the same die with a huge bandwidth interconnect on-die. Intel's Hyperthreading is a gimmicky technology that has a very small real-world impact on performance.
And your personal "benchmarks" cite no numbers. I be trolled!
It means we're going to have to lean to program in parallel.
Not really. If you've been using SMP servers, what's different about SMP on a chip? Even if you only have a few dozen Apache processes running, Solaris will schedule them onto Niagara just like if you had lots of separate CPUs.
I don't think this is as big a change as people think. The main advantage will be a super-efficient CPU (50 to 60 watts, IIRC) but with the performance of many regular CPUs (hundreds of watts).
What's not exciting about a 32-way single board computer? You don't have to program for it any differently than a 32-way SMP mainframe. Solaris does the rest for you.
"You must be a young lad; or at least, you did not own any Sun I386 just before the Sparc came. Now you see the carpet, now you don't."
Part of that is that basically no one bought the 386-based systems. There are rumors of Sun actually making 486-based systems only to not ship them (I read this in a FAQ somewhere).
Not selling 386 well probably was caused by their SPARCs being the fasest workstations available at the time. On the postitive side Solaris x86 never really went away, which is lucky for Sun now that Opteron is around.
You can't possibly have expected everything to remain moving from SunOS 4 to SunOS 5. This revision was Sun completely gutting and rearchitecting their operating system! This isn't a secret, either.
(More than a few workstations are enterprise level machines)
The only difference between a lot of Sun's workstations and their entry-level enterprise servers is only the case. The system board, CPUs, and RAM are often the same (Ultra60-E220R,Ultra80-E420R,Blade2000-280R,Blade2 500-V250). This also means the resourceful admin on a budget knows what part numbers will work, even if they aren't "official."
Yeah, but Sun actually has a market to sell to. SGI's box is custom hardware with a custom Linux kernel that really appeals to the smallest upper echelon of supercomputer buyers. Look in any common datacenter, and there's a good chance of seeing the Sun logo in there. The odds of seeing an SGI logo are slim.
But is there any way that Solaris has a chance to grow enough to become any kind of threat to MS?
Yes, because the technology in the Solaris 10 kernel blows Windows Server out of the water, and JDS/Evolution/StarOffice/Mozilla is quite appropriate to replace Windows XP in many situations.
Quite honestly, give a secretary/manager/call-center-person a good locked down JDS box, and he/she won't be installing ActiveX crap all over with fancy spyware screensavers.
One of the absolutely huge advantages of Sun over, say, Red Hat, is that Sun doesn't pull the carpet out from under their users every three years. OpenWindows stuck around until Solaris 9, I think, which means CDE is good to be around for quite some time. Sun always provides predictable transitions and always documents what will happen in advance for customers to plan ahead.
Sun also has a good record for maintaining compatibility to older versions of Solaris. I was quite pleased to see that older SunPCi IIpro cards can still work under Solaris 10 with JDS (with Windows 98, at least). Officially, these cards are supported only up to Solaris 9.
If I were running a big shop with my behind accountable for more than a year in the future, Sun is not a bad bet.
I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color.
How many Sun workstations since about 1996 don't do 24-bit easily? Anything with a Creator card or better is good to go. Before 1996 24-bit was still easy to bet by adding VSIMM chips to the SPARCstation 20. Earlier SPARCstations needed some sort of gargantuan video boards for 24-bit, though.
Yeah, I second that. pkg-get is one of the cleanest package tools I've used. Launch it, walk away for a while, come back, and all the dependent packages are there all nice and tidy.
They've actually been working on OpenSolaris for five years, and this summer it will be a genuine OSS _UNIX_. Not a work-alike UNIX but the real deal with more than two decades worth of production system use. It hasn't scaled to 64+ CPUs just this year, but more than five years ago. It hasn't just gotten solid virtualization technology, it's had it for years. For example.
I haven't tried it, yet, but it looks like there is support for Windows-like CD burning in the Nautilus ("This Computer") application. There is also Windows-like printer management, which is nice.
Oh, BTW, don't forget to finish off the system with Blastwave. They provide a BSD-like package retriever that's integrated with Solaris' package system. Pretty slick.
I'm typing this comment from my _free_ downloaded Solaris 10 with JDS3, right now. Great system, but just like other GNOME/KDE desktops, don't skimp on your RAM, though. Any computer better than say a 400MHz Pentium with 256MB should be okay (not super but okay).
Probably the best aspect of JDS3 is that everything is pretty well integrated, clearly laid out, and there are few problems with it. It really is as easy to use as Windows. It comes with Acroread, Mozilla, Evolution, and Staroffice, among other things, too. Add Moneydance for covering finances, and it really can replace Windows for a lot of people.
With these sorts of GNOME/KDE desktops maturing, Microsoft really needs to get their ship in order!
RAID is cheap compared to some sort of custom solution. In fact, isn't that why RAID came about?
Besides, my first reaction to the $12K price tag was, "That's really not so bad." It is easy to get into $30K+ with some RAID arrays (mil-spec, fully redundant, etc.).
Yes, but would you want something as important as these projects running on a home-built unit? They need something that's actually known to work beforehand.
Sun is offering a vanilla Solaris environment that pretty much anyone is familiar with. Is IBM able to deliver a vanilla RHEL/SuSE Enterprise environment on BlueGene? There is a slight difference between a custom-built supercomputer and a rack of standard Opteron and SPARC servers. It seems the other IBM services listed at the bottom of the article are more in-line with Sun's offering.
I re-played Deus Ex on the PS2 recently, and I agree. That game had more plot than the next five games combined, and the graphics on that game were not the best for the PS2. Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy both push the graphics far more, for example.
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"Intel has had Hyperthreading available in Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs for a couple of years now, which does exactly what the article is talking about"
You are wrong. Period. Sun's CMT is several independent CPU cores on the same die with a huge bandwidth interconnect on-die. Intel's Hyperthreading is a gimmicky technology that has a very small real-world impact on performance.
And your personal "benchmarks" cite no numbers. I be trolled!
It means we're going to have to lean to program in parallel.
Not really. If you've been using SMP servers, what's different about SMP on a chip? Even if you only have a few dozen Apache processes running, Solaris will schedule them onto Niagara just like if you had lots of separate CPUs.
I don't think this is as big a change as people think. The main advantage will be a super-efficient CPU (50 to 60 watts, IIRC) but with the performance of many regular CPUs (hundreds of watts).
What's not exciting about a 32-way single board computer? You don't have to program for it any differently than a 32-way SMP mainframe. Solaris does the rest for you.
"You must be a young lad; or at least, you did not own any Sun I386 just before the Sparc came. Now you see the carpet, now you don't."
Part of that is that basically no one bought the 386-based systems. There are rumors of Sun actually making 486-based systems only to not ship them (I read this in a FAQ somewhere).
Not selling 386 well probably was caused by their SPARCs being the fasest workstations available at the time. On the postitive side Solaris x86 never really went away, which is lucky for Sun now that Opteron is around.
You can't possibly have expected everything to remain moving from SunOS 4 to SunOS 5. This revision was Sun completely gutting and rearchitecting their operating system! This isn't a secret, either.
(More than a few workstations are enterprise level machines)
2 500-V250). This also means the resourceful admin on a budget knows what part numbers will work, even if they aren't "official."
The only difference between a lot of Sun's workstations and their entry-level enterprise servers is only the case. The system board, CPUs, and RAM are often the same (Ultra60-E220R,Ultra80-E420R,Blade2000-280R,Blade
Yeah, but Sun actually has a market to sell to. SGI's box is custom hardware with a custom Linux kernel that really appeals to the smallest upper echelon of supercomputer buyers. Look in any common datacenter, and there's a good chance of seeing the Sun logo in there. The odds of seeing an SGI logo are slim.
But is there any way that Solaris has a chance to grow enough to become any kind of threat to MS?
Yes, because the technology in the Solaris 10 kernel blows Windows Server out of the water, and JDS/Evolution/StarOffice/Mozilla is quite appropriate to replace Windows XP in many situations.
Quite honestly, give a secretary/manager/call-center-person a good locked down JDS box, and he/she won't be installing ActiveX crap all over with fancy spyware screensavers.
That screenshot in the link is CDE, not JDS/GNOME. JDS is really quite pleasing to look at.
One of the absolutely huge advantages of Sun over, say, Red Hat, is that Sun doesn't pull the carpet out from under their users every three years. OpenWindows stuck around until Solaris 9, I think, which means CDE is good to be around for quite some time. Sun always provides predictable transitions and always documents what will happen in advance for customers to plan ahead.
Sun also has a good record for maintaining compatibility to older versions of Solaris. I was quite pleased to see that older SunPCi IIpro cards can still work under Solaris 10 with JDS (with Windows 98, at least). Officially, these cards are supported only up to Solaris 9.
If I were running a big shop with my behind accountable for more than a year in the future, Sun is not a bad bet.
I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color.
How many Sun workstations since about 1996 don't do 24-bit easily? Anything with a Creator card or better is good to go. Before 1996 24-bit was still easy to bet by adding VSIMM chips to the SPARCstation 20. Earlier SPARCstations needed some sort of gargantuan video boards for 24-bit, though.
Yeah, I second that. pkg-get is one of the cleanest package tools I've used. Launch it, walk away for a while, come back, and all the dependent packages are there all nice and tidy.
JDS3 is based on GNOME, and it runs on Solaris. Quite well, too.
Actually, the StarFire came out in 1997, so they've been 64-way for more than eight years, now.
They've actually been working on OpenSolaris for five years, and this summer it will be a genuine OSS _UNIX_. Not a work-alike UNIX but the real deal with more than two decades worth of production system use. It hasn't scaled to 64+ CPUs just this year, but more than five years ago. It hasn't just gotten solid virtualization technology, it's had it for years. For example.
I haven't tried it, yet, but it looks like there is support for Windows-like CD burning in the Nautilus ("This Computer") application. There is also Windows-like printer management, which is nice.
Oh, BTW, don't forget to finish off the system with Blastwave. They provide a BSD-like package retriever that's integrated with Solaris' package system. Pretty slick.
I'm typing this comment from my _free_ downloaded Solaris 10 with JDS3, right now. Great system, but just like other GNOME/KDE desktops, don't skimp on your RAM, though. Any computer better than say a 400MHz Pentium with 256MB should be okay (not super but okay).
Probably the best aspect of JDS3 is that everything is pretty well integrated, clearly laid out, and there are few problems with it. It really is as easy to use as Windows. It comes with Acroread, Mozilla, Evolution, and Staroffice, among other things, too. Add Moneydance for covering finances, and it really can replace Windows for a lot of people.
With these sorts of GNOME/KDE desktops maturing, Microsoft really needs to get their ship in order!
RAID is cheap compared to some sort of custom solution. In fact, isn't that why RAID came about?
Besides, my first reaction to the $12K price tag was, "That's really not so bad." It is easy to get into $30K+ with some RAID arrays (mil-spec, fully redundant, etc.).
Yes, but would you want something as important as these projects running on a home-built unit? They need something that's actually known to work beforehand.
"As a DoD Defense Contractor working on these [Windows] systems.... ...(the government can ill-afford downtime on some of these systems)."
By choosing Microsoft, you already made the choice that you can afford the downtime.
Sun is offering a vanilla Solaris environment that pretty much anyone is familiar with. Is IBM able to deliver a vanilla RHEL/SuSE Enterprise environment on BlueGene? There is a slight difference between a custom-built supercomputer and a rack of standard Opteron and SPARC servers. It seems the other IBM services listed at the bottom of the article are more in-line with Sun's offering.
But saying Nintendo games are only for kids is kind of like saying Shrek was a kid's movie.
Shrek wasn't a kids' movie, it was a cliche movie.
I re-played Deus Ex on the PS2 recently, and I agree. That game had more plot than the next five games combined, and the graphics on that game were not the best for the PS2. Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy both push the graphics far more, for example.
The best designs will use both...
Yes, Sun's Niagara is indeed both (eight cores, four threads per core).