2009/06/24
TheRegister: Sun buffs InfiniBand for Constellation supers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
The second-generation InfiniBand switch that Sun Microsystems has been showing off since last November made its debut this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The new switch - coupled to new servers based on Intel's "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500 processors as well as existing quad-core "Shanghai" Opterons (and soon to be six-core variants) - is the core of the upgraded Constellation HPC clusters that Sun has been pushing for two years as a means of getting back into the supercomputing space.
The new "Project M2" 648-port modular quad data rate InfiniBand switch - as well as two low-end fixed-port switches that run their ports at the same 40 Gb/sec speed - are all based on new InfiniBand protocol chips made by Mellanox. (That vendor launched its own line of switches that span up to the same 648 ports running at QDR speeds yesterday ahead of ISC '09). Sun was previewing its QDR InfiniBand switches as well as its Nehalem EP blade servers and some integrated storage (with solid state drives) aimed at HPC customers, and now, it is ready to start shipping boxes.
According to Michael Brown, marketing manager for HPC at Sun, the company has sold over 2 petaflops of Constellation machinery and about half of that is based on the new Nehalem machines that were announced two months ago and the new QDR InfiniBand switches. "That's a pretty big chunk of business," says Brown with a certain amount of satisfaction.
To be fair, the Constellation boxes have been a bright spot for Sun, which is finally getting some play on the Top 500 list of supercomputers. About a quarter of the petaflops that Sun has shipped or that are on order for Constellation boxes come from one machine, the "Ranger" Constellation box at the University of Texas, with a few other big deals contributing tens of teraflops on top of that. Constellation needs a lot more sales, as do Sun's generic rack and blade servers for customers who don't want to adopt InfiniBand and who might prefer cheap Gigabit Ethernet or alternative 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching.
A single Constellation rack has 48 full-height or 96 half-height blade servers, plus the switching and storage, for a maximum of 768 cores using Nehalem EP Xeon or Shanghai Opteron processors. Various labs that are thinking well below the petaflops performance level that IBM, Cray, Silicon Graphics, and Sun are chasing (and to a lesser extent, so are Dell and Hewlett-Packard) and are looking at buying Constellation machines that span only one or two racks. The adoption of the six-core Istanbul Opterons sometime in the next quarter in the X6240 and X6440 blade servers, which will only require a BIOS update on the blades, certainly won't hurt sales of smaller racks, allowing customers to pack 1,152 cores in a rack.
Brown says that Sun's HPC business is more than just Constellation boxes, but was not at liberty to say what percentage of Sun's HPC sales come from outside of Constellation setups. As an example, he says that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has bought seventeen of Sun's X4600 Opteron servers (which each have 16 cores) plus some storage and its Grid Engine gridding software to make a baby cluster. This setup at UNC includes 45 Sun workstations as well as a mix of storage, and it harkens back to the kinds of deals Sun used to do all the time back in the 1990s, deals that made it a name in academic computing right beside Digital Equipment.
InfoWorld: A call to arms: IT must prepare for datacenter regulation
by Ted Samson
Green IT has flourished in datacenters across the United States and beyond over the past couple of years, driven primarily by organizations' desire to cut costs on energy, cooling, new hardware investments, and facility expansion or construction projects. A new driver for honing datacenter efficiency is now looming, however, and datacenter operators should pay heed: Governmental regulation is coming, and the industry needs to prepare.
Such is the argument laid out by Mike Manos, senior vice president of technical services at Digital Realty Trust. Manos – formerly the general manager of Microsoft's datacenter division – argues in his blog that political leaders will soon shine a legislative spotlight on datacenters in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to prevent global warming. "Whether you view this to be a good thing or bad thing, it's something that you and your company are going to have to start planning for very shortly. This is no longer a drill," he cautions.
Moreover, Manos makes the case that datacenter operators need to get involved now in helping develop the aforementioned regulation, unless pencil-pushers who don't understand datacenters crank out unreasonable or unsuitable rules.
Already we've seen governmental bodies paying special attention to the technology industry – specifically datacenters. Manos points to the United Kingdom's Carbon Reduction Commitment, introduced as part of the Climate Change Act 2008. "The main purpose of the CRC is a mandatory carbon reduction and energy efficiency scheme aimed at changing energy use behaviors and further [incentivizing] the adoption of technology and infrastructure," Manos writes. "While not specifically aimed at datacenters (it's aimed at everyone), you can see that by its definition, datacenters will be significantly affected."
U.K. organizations can expect a carbon cap-and-trade system to be implemented in 2010. They'll face limits on how much CO2 they can emit. Companies that are able to produce fewer emissions than they're allowed will be able to sell their extra CO2 emissions permits to companies that can't keep their emissions within bounds. Organizations that fail to comply face fines (not to mention bad PR).
Why do datacenter managers specifically need to take heed? Organizations that consumed more than 6,000 MWh (megawatt hours) in 2008 need to participate in the program, and as significant consumers of energy, datacenters will not escape scrutiny.
CNet: Netbooks are notebooks
by Gordon Haff
There's a bit of an anti-Netbooks meme making the rounds in blogs and on Twitter and the expected push-back from their fans. From where I sit, this is fueled partially by the conflating of product and product category, partially by competitive sniping, and partially by genuine consumer confusion. Let me try to tease those threads apart.
I've been skeptical from pretty much the beginning that there was a bright line distinction between Netbooks and other inexpensive, small form-factor notebooks. And it's this lack of a truly standalone category that analyst Michael Gartenberg is writing about in his provocatively titled "Netbooks R.I.P."
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare asked, adding "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." While some perceive the netbook as a new product category – a class of device that's never existed – I would have to beg to differ. A netbook is merely a laptop with the pivotal axis based on price first and foremost... Sure, my price-oriented definition might sound heretical to those who view the netbook as an ode to cloud computing, ubiquitous usage scenarios, and freedom from Microsoft OS tyranny, but that's not how the market has shaped out.
The current generation of Netbooks tends to have certain defining characteristics--specifically Intel Atom processors and the Windows XP (or Linux). But, as Gartenberg notes, a 7-inch screen also used to be a defining characteristic. Now many Netbooks come with 10-inch screens. Come Windows 7 and future processor generations from Intel (and AMD), I expect any clear distinctions that exist today to rapidly blur.
That's not to say that analysts and product managers won't create a bucket for small, price-focused notebooks. They may call that bucket "Netbooks." They may call it "Value Ultraportables." They may call it "Fred."
IT industry people like to chop markets into named categories for reasons of their own, even if as a fellow analyst said at a recent meeting: "the average consumer calls everything a laptop anyway."
One reason that the nomenclature fight around Netbooks is more intense than such battles tend to be is that the distinction between Netbooks and other ultra-portable notebooks is also a fault line in a competitive battle between Intel and AMD.
For Intel, Netbooks have been the big product category win for its Atom processor. (If a somewhat serendipitous win. Atom was originally more focused on a new class of "Mobile Internet Devices" (MID), a product category that so far hasn't taken off.) For its part, AMD has focused on an incrementally higher price and processing power point with its Athlon Neo platform (found in the HP dv2).
As a result, it's in Intel's interests to promote Netbooks as something new that is both apart from and incremental to the notebooks that use higher-end (and higher dollar) Intel parts. At the same time, it's in AMD's interest to denigrate Netbooks as underpowered and not real PCs.
Finally, there is a continuing trickle of evidence, such as this NPD Group report, suggesting that consumer satisfaction with Netbooks isn't all that great.
Like James Robertson, this latest report struck me as a bit curious. Many of the people I know with Netbooks are almost excessively fond of them. However, it's fair comment that most of the people I know as also geeks, are attracted to the new and different, and understand what a Netbook class of device can do--and what it can't. It doesn't stretch credulity to imagine less educated consumers taking a $300 notebook home and then being dissatisfied because it's not a general replacement for a $1,000 notebook.
Highly portable notebooks without the road warrior premiums historically associated with portability are a great advance for consumers. But I'm also excited about the devices that new screen technologies and widespread wireless connectivity could enable. The possibilities in this space are great. Netbooks are just a flavor of notebook
