Cray and the New Opteron 6100 Series

This morning at around 1:00AM Manila Time, I was able to join a webinar entitled Cray Boosts Performance with New 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processor", which was hosted by Linux Magazine.

Presented by David Wallace of Cray Inc. and Travis Justilian of AMD (should have been Joshua Mora). The presentation is about Cray (XT6 Production Supercomputers) utilizing the new AMD Opterons for more performance/MFLOPS, as well as efficiency for a greener computing, and more.

Indeed the AMD features now more cores (up to 12), more cache (12MB), more bandwidth (via DDR3-1333), and more efficient (45nm). Live polls were carried out during the webinar, and about 53% of the audience uses Opteron-based solutions.

Before the webinar, I first browsed for info on the new Opteron 6100 Series. I quickly saw the "Enhanced integrated memory controller supporting four channels of DDR3 memory". Initially I was thinking about quad-channel memory, but then I as I further dig through, Magny-Cours (the codename of the new opteron processors) are actually two 6-core istanbuls in one package. So applying AMD's medicine against intel years back, this is "not a true and native 12-core CPU" but two 6-core CPUs (12 cores, two dies). Thus the integrated memory controller is not quad-channel but two dual-channel IMCs. Nevertheless, it provided the new Opteron 6100 series more than double the memory bandwith of its predecessors.

Going back to the presentation, the Cray is able to utilize the 12 cores with the use of Core Specialization, which allows the user to pin a single core on the node to the OS and devote the remainder to application code. Plus now with whopping 12MB L3 cache, it improves performance by reducing the amount of time spent accessing data in higher-latency system memory. In addition to this, Cray has the new Gemini Interconnect that directly leverages the HT connection, thus ensuring full bandwidth. Cray also has CLE3 (Cray Linux Environment generation 3), which is an adaptive Linux OS that can scale up to 500,000 and more cores, and the Cray Programming Environment.

Some additional info, the Cray Inc. holds the number 1 and 3 spots of the top 500 Supercomputers for November 2009, as well as 19 systems included in the Green 500 of November 2009.

I will share to you the slides in PDF as soon as Linux Magazine sends it to the webinar attendees.  Cheers!

[Book] Pro Linux System Administration

This book reached my door yesterday. I bought it from Amazon for USD31.49. 1,025 pages added to my technical library. E-books are great, but if you can afford paper then go paper.

May the FOSS be with us!

Microsoft unleashes 20,000 lines of Linux code.

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft is releasing three Microsoft-developed Linux drivers to the Linux community for possible inclusion in the Linux source tree. This is the first time Microsoft has made in-house code available directly to the Linux community. READ FULL STORY

Sun's Open Network Systems Launch

Date: 30 Jun, 2009 (Tuesday) 08:00AM-01:30PM
Venue: Quezon Ballroom Makati Shangri-la Hotel
Web: https://events.sun.com.ph
Register: http://events.sun.com.ph/registration.html

--

With greater economic pressures on businesses, this is the time for organizations to revisit their data center model, starting with the optimization of IT resources to gain better datacenter efficiencies and scale.

Give your datacenter an efficiency makeover with our latest Open Network Systems – a full range of versatile, flash-ready x64 rackmount servers, workstation and blade modular systems – that set to maximize the economics of computing with breakthrough application performance, scale and cost-efficiency.

Join us as we unveil the new Sun systems based on Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. Furthering our leadership in networking and Open Network Systems, Sun is the first vendor to embed low-latency high performance networking and Sun's SSD/Flash storage technology in these revolutionary systems to deliver speed, simplicity and savings.

Add new touches to your datacenter by redefining your system performance now!

Seats are limited. Register early.

Sincerely,

Sun Microsystems Phils., Inc.

Fedora 11

You can get Fedora 11 here:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Want KDE? go here:

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-kde

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project.

Jolicloud

Jolicloud is a new operating system for netbooks. The OS provides a beautiful interface, an application directory, and a set of social features that make it easy and fun to use.

Website: http://www.jolicloud.com/

Tour: http://www.jolicloud.com/tour

To get Jolicloud, you have to request for an invitation:
http://my.jolicloud.com/account/invitation?next=%2Fregister

The Ubuntu 9.04 CDs Have Arrived!

Too bad I still have to pay P35.00 at the post office, anyways I got the disks and 4 stickers!

You too can also get them, go here:
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

By the way, you will need a Launchpad Account (FREE):
https://login.launchpad.net/+openid

May the FOSS be with you!

Fedora 9 Live on USB - liveusb-creator

Here is another great way to try Linux, put the Live CD to a USB flashdrive. Doing such may involve many steps plus the use of the command line as shown in this wiki. But there is an easy and fast way to do it, via the liveusb-creator.

The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. You can get this nifty application from the official site: fedorahosted.org.

To try this, I have downloaded the Fedora-9-i686-Live-KDE Live CD. See my screenshots below:

Extracted the files from the zip archive then launched liveusb-creator.exe.

At this point you can browse for the Fedora 9 Live CD iso or download. Earlier I got Fedora-9-i686-Live-KDE. I am also using my Transend 8GB USB Flash Drive.

Persistent Storage (see note/caption below).

I've set it to max.

Done! Really simple and fast.

The whole installation with the maximum persistence storage cost me 2.67GB.

Files and folders in the Root...

... in the LiveOS folder...

... in the Syslinux folder.

The Fedora 9 Desktop (KDE).

Some more system and application screenshots:

Software Freedom Day 2008

Software Freedom Day 2008 was held last Saturday (Sept. 21)  in many parts of the globe. Here in Manila alone, there were three venues I know... University of Makati, NCC-University of the Philippines (UP Diliman), and New Era University (NEU). 

A week before, I was able to register just in time for the one at UP. The plan was  to attend the opening at UP then go to NEU. But due to work last Friday, I need to stay up late that night till about 3AM the next day. With little time and energy left and  some important duties I have to attend that saturday afternoon, thus I was unable to attend the SFD 2008. 

Oh well, I'll do my best to attend one on 2009 and the years to come. 8) 

Open Solaris 2008.05

OpenSolaris is an operating system (OS), an open source project licensed under CDDL, and a community. The project's goals are innovation, collaboration, and the extension of OpenSolaris technology.

Official Website:http://opensolaris.org/index.html

Related article:

OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up by ZDNet's Jason Perlow -- What would Ubuntu be like if it were an OS for grown-ups? This week at its CommunityOne event in San Francisco, Sun will release its May 2008 build of OpenSolaris (2008.05) the Open Source operating system based on the source code of the Solaris 10 enterprise UNIX OS, the first to be designated with “Production” support [...]

[Screenshots.]

[Get Open Solaris 2008.5 here.]