Monthly Archives: September 2011

SPARC T4 looks to be good enough to stave off defections to x86, Linux

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For those who are still members of the Sparc/Solaris installed base—those who haven’t headed for x86 or Itanium already—the T4 is potentially good news. It provides a way to preserve investments in existing Solaris skills and software while getting a significant performance boost over the year-old T3. The T4 will likely stop some defections, buy Oracle time as it prepares its next generation of processor, and reduce the company’s dependence on reselling Fujitsu SPARC 64 systems to run its own database.

via SPARC T4 looks to be good enough to stave off defections to x86, Linux.

Citrix drops dependencies on Windows to boost XenServer with v6.0

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“Site Recovery in previous versions was dependent on the StorageLink Gateway component which was a Windows-based separate installation,” Citrix says. “With XenServer 6.0 the StorageLink functionality is delivered as a native part of XenCenter and the Site Recovery functionality is done natively as well.”

This also allows Citrix to support replication on a greater number of storage devices.Similarly, a Windows VM requirement was removed for access to storage features like data replication, de-duplication, snapshots and cloning, while a new workload balancing tool uses a Linux-based virtual appliance “with a smaller footprint [that] replaces the Windows-based virtual appliance and eliminates the Windows licensing dependency,” Citrix said.

via Citrix drops dependencies on Windows to boost XenServer with v6.0.

Here’s an interesting comment on this article:

agrocrag | a day ago | permalink
I don’t know what all the stuff in this article means, but I have to use a thin client at work that is connected to a Citrix-based server, and it is bar none the worst computing experience I have ever had.
And another:
dal20402 | about 17 hours ago | permalink
It’s really OT for this article, but as a user subjected to XenApp, I can confirm that the user experience is horrendous. It’s pretty stable and reliable in our office, but, even running on quite good hardware with few users connected, it’s absolutely dog-slow, and feels like using a computer while suspended in a jar of molasses.If I’m doing any significant amount of work on the weekends, I’ll go into the office rather than trying to use our XenApp system from home. I save more time by not waiting for the system than I use making the commute.

Another interesting tidbit further down in the comments…

Fast forward ten years and now thin client desktops cost more than quad core workstations.

Is this true?

Texas Advanced Computing Center

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When completed, Stampede will comprise several thousand Dell “Zeus” servers with each server having dual 8-core processors from the forthcoming Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family (formerly codenamed “Sandy Bridge-EP”) and each server with 32 gigabytes of memory. This production system will offer almost 2 petaflops of peak performance, which is double the current top system in XD, and the real performance of scientific applications will see an even greater performance boost due to the newer processor and interconnect technologies. The cluster will also include a new innovative capability: Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors codenamed “Knights Corner,” providing an additional 8 petaflops of performance. Intel MIC co-processors are designed to process highly parallel workloads and provide the benefits of using the most popular x86 instruction set. This will greatly simplify the task of porting and optimizing applications on Stampede to utilize the performance of both the Intel Xeon processors and Intel MIC co-processors.

via Texas Advanced Computing Center.

DOORS

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rcm2 limited has considerable experience and expertise in Systems Engineering/System Integration processes, Requirements Management processes and IT tools, in particular the DOORS database from Telelogic. We have a number of DOORS licenses that are shared among our DOORS User Group for various client projects and internal consultancy as well as bespoke solutions.

via DOORS (Dynamic Object-Oriented Requirements System).

Open Virtualization Alliance signs 200+ members

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The rapid growth in OVA membership is a sign of KVM’s potential in emerging markets and the cloud, where open virtualization is poised to be a key technology that can help reduce costs, increase virtual machine density, and improve performance and scalability. In fact, according to a recent member survey, more than 50 percent of OVA members are focused on cloud computing.

via Open Virtualization Alliance signs 200+ members – TechSpot News.

How to build your own Linux distro

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Few new distros are created from scratch, although it is possible – see the Linux From Scratch HOWTOs at www.linuxfromscratch.org if you want to try it. Apart from getting a head start, there are other reasons to hang on the coat-tails of another distro, and probably the biggest is package compatibility. Consider that there are over 18,000 free software packages considered good enough to be in Debian, and many more that aren’t on that project’s radar.

How to build your own Linux distro | TuxRadar Linux.

Inside the Linux boot process

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Summary: The process of booting a Linux® system consists of a number of stages. But whether you’re booting a standard x86 desktop or a deeply embedded PowerPC® target, much of the flow is surprisingly similar. This article explores the Linux boot process from the initial bootstrap to the start of the first user-space application. Along the way, you’ll learn about various other boot-related topics such as the boot loaders, kernel decompression, the initial RAM disk, and other elements of Linux boot.

via Inside the Linux boot process.

$1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

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The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing. The details are impressive: 3,809 compute instances, each with eight cores and 7GB of RAM, for a total of 30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. Security was ensured with HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption, and the cluster ran across data centers in three Amazon regions in the United States and Europe. The cluster was dubbed “Nekomata.”

via $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud.