CHIPS 'N DIPS

Musings on Broadbus and Multicore.

November 2007

It's Sun's ZFS, of course, but I've been tracking news of Apple's implementation of Sun's Zettabyte File System, and I'm not the only one.

French blogger Blaese thinks the main limitation now is the UI: that you have to access it as root from the command line. He also thinks that there's some confusion in Appleland over pools and volumes and disks.

I wonder if Sun didn't sow seeds of confusion by naming it the Zettabyte File System when it's not a file system. That's what Tom Yaeger said when he called it "nearly perfect" and said it was "limitlessly flexible" and "easy enough for a child to manage."

Even before Leopard was released, Gregg Keizer was speculating that ZFS could be Apple's secret weapon. Of course that was shortly after Jonathan Schwartz misled everyone about what Apple was going to do with ZFS. Gregg pointed out back then that Sun was already apparently regretting the name and, IBM-like, asking people to treat ZFS as a name and not an acronym.

Schwartz thinks ZFS is a big deal. One company that agrees, but considers it a big legal deal, is NetApp, which has sued Sun, claiming that ZFS rips off NetApp's patented technology. Sigh.

ZFS is indeed a big deal. If you don't know all about it, check out Sun's introduction. And for Apple's implementation, you might start with the man page.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 12:40 PM  Permalink |

Here are a few more of the folks exhibiting or presenting at SC07, the ACM/IEEE-sponsored International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, running from November 10th through the 16th at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.

RapidMind will be showing off the latest version of its software designed to let you actually benefit from the added processing power of multi-core chips.

Advanced Cluster Systems will be making an announcement on Tuesday that I think will be interesting. The provocative phrase 'move beyond ridiculously parallel solutions' will appear in it.

NEC just announced what they claim is 'the world's fastest vector computer,' and some of the key people involved with that will be at SC07. And DataDirect is debuting what they call 'the fastest storage system on the planet.'

Not for nothing do they call it SUPERcomputing 07.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:52 PM  Permalink |

SC07, the ACM/IEE-sponsored International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, runs from November 10th, that's tomorrow, through the 16th at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. Here are some of the companies and products I know of that will be appearing at SC07.

Calgary-based Acceleware will be showing off their Accelerator Board and ClusterInABox Workstation solutions at the NVIDIA booth; tools they claim put supercomputing capabilities on the desktop.

IBM will host an invitation-only event to meet and chat with HPC execs from the company, like Michael Henesey, the Vice President of IBM's Deep Computing. Tony Belfi will speak on 'Innovation Beyond Imagination: The Road to Petaflops Computing,' and IBM will also do demos related to Blue Gene/P.

Cray will be there with news of launch of the Cray XT5 family of supercomputers, including the industry’s first integrated hybrid supercomputer.

Infinera (INFN), one of the companies behind Internet2's high-speed network for the
scientific community, will be making three announcements at the show.

NASA will be there, talking about their climate work in addition to the obvious space stuff. The DOE will be there.

Interactive Supercomputing will announce a new version of their parallel computing platform, Star-P, around the show.

Dell will be talking up their cluster and cloud computing initatives.

A new book that sounds pretty interesting, Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, will be released at the show.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:15 PM  Permalink |

I grew up on "American Bandstand," and I used to cringe when it came to the Rate a Record segment, because I knew that the kids were going to give the record a totally meaningless numerical rating and when Dick Clark asked why they gave it an 87 or whatever it was, they would invariably say, "It has a good beat and I can dance to it."

Online music recommendation systems built into iTunes and Amazon are more sophisticated than this, giving you the benefit of the musical judgement of others who are in some sense like you, but ultimately they amount to the same thing: the essentially unexplained preferences of strangers.

Sun Microsystems has a different idea with its project Seach Inside the Music. It uses machine learning to actually analyze aspects of the music you like. Sun plans to release the technology as open source, maybe within the next six months.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:33 PM  Permalink |