The MPT fusion device driver for the LSI SAS 1064 chipset is only natively supported in Solaris 10. Sun provides an extra-drivers CD for two distributions RH and SuSE enterprise editions and offers a rather involved procedure for creating install media with the appropriate drivers on alimited set of these distributions:

Red Hat Linux 3.0 Update 5 and later updates, 32-bit and 64-bit
Red Hat Linux 4.0 Update 1 and later updates, 64-bit
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP1 and later SPs, 64-bit

Others have documented successful use of this procedure with Debian. (And here.)

Sun also provides a utility called Sun Installation Assistant.

The Sun Installation Assistant software on CD-ROM is included in the ship-kit with every Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 server. It’s a Linux installation utility that ‘reduces the complexity of installing supported Linux distributions on new hardware’.

A newly released platform seldom has a certified set of drivers already in a current Linux distribution. Typically, the result is that an administrator will be required to generate driver disks for each of the supported Linux distributions that they plan to install. Additionally, Linux distributions do not contain support for non-platform drivers such as the Service Processor. A complete Linux installation on a Sun Fire X4100 or X4200 server can be performed using the Sun Installation Assistant CD-ROM either locally or remotely using the remote KVMS features provided by ILOM and the JavaRConsole. Once the system has been booted from the media or image, a boot kernel is loaded and probes the platform configuration. Upon recognition that the server is a supported platform, a list of the currently supported Linux distributions is displayed and the user is prompted to insert disk 1 of the supported Linux distribution of their choice. Disk 1 can be either a physical CD-ROM disk or a JavaRConsole redirected iso disk image. The Linux distribution installation continues as usual until completion.

Following installation completion, the certified platform and device drivers are installed and the complete installation is completed without necessitating cumbersome driver installation procedures.

The Sun Installation Assistant manages the software installation of:

Supported Linux operating systems
Platform-specific software
Diagnostic and fault management software
Add-on components such as the JES middleware stack

The latest version of Ubuntu v6.06 LTS codenamed Dapper Drake, has the MPT drivers integrated into the distribution. it’s available here. It boots, sees the disks on their new controllers, configs and loads. It plays well with our NIS and NFS domains.

Now we’re waiting for 454 test data.

In a world of multiple CPU cores, clusters, and grids, how do we define supercomputing?

Is supercomputing simply more boxes performing ‘embarrassingly parallel’ jobs or does it require massive single system images (SSI) under SMP or ccNUMA? Not all Grand Challenge problems require vector processors and not all problems are easily parceled out to swarms of loosely interconnected cluster systems. How broadly does the definition of supercomputing apply?

Wikipedia defines supercomputing as:

A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. The term “Super Computing” was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 to refer to a large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University.

Seymour Cray described the different approaches in the famous quote: “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”.

When I worked at Cray Research, Inc. through the 1990’s it was popular to say ’speeds and feeds’. I/O subsystems themselves where supercomputers as they dedicated their power to feeding the processing systems. Y-MPs, C-90, and T3 systems were certainly world leading systems of their time. For a period of time, Cray defined the field.

Times have changed and chickens are cheaper, stronger, and easier to manage than ever before. The interconnects faster and more reliable. Powerful cluster systems can be built using Commodity off The Shelf (COTS) hardware and Open Source operating systems such as LINUX. Cray said, “Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.”, this is increasingly true as processors have become commodities. In fact, most systems on the Top500 list use processors found in commodity systems.

Does the differentiation between true supercomputing and distributed computing with clusters and grids boil down to the interconnects between processors and systems? According to the Top500 list, 51.2% of the Top500 supercomputers use Gigabit Ethernet to connect systems.

As it stands, it appears the chickens are winning.

(Note: This thought it still developing.)

PocketMac released version 4.0 for the Blackberry and now supports iSync to the BlackBerry® Pearl™ 8100™. It lets you load new applications and synchronize email, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes with popular Mac applications, including:

Mail.app Email
Entourage® Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes
Address Book Contacts
iCal® Calendar and Tasks
Now Contact®/Now Up-To-Date® Contacts, Calendars & Tasks
Meeting Maker Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks
Lotus Notes Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks
Safari Bookmarks (One-Way, Mac to BB sync)

It’s available now to BlackBerry customers as a free download.

It looks like this gamble payed off. I’ll let you know how it works when my Pearl arrives. It seems they are backordered through T-Mobile. No word on when to expect shipment.

As I’m starting to add Ruby to my toolkit, my colleague Trevor has begun to develop interfaces into Life Science database applications using Flex built on top of Ruby Rails. Rails handles the transport of XML data to and from appropriate databases to populate components of the Flex application interface. The result is a clean looking, interactive application, that runs in any browser. The time saved building and testing the UI is substantial.

Flex doesn’t require a special server, such as JSP require Tomcat. The programmer does not have to test the interface everywhere. Rendering occurs on the client. The required Flash Player is built into most modern browser distributions.

Macromedia describes Flex as a server component that enables you to create rich presentation layers for Internet applications. Interfaces built in Flex rely on Macromedia Flash Player for display on client systems. Essential components of Flex are:

An XML language (MXML) used to describe the application interface.
An ECMA scripting language (ActionScript) used with MXML to handle user and system events or to construct complex data models.
A class library
Runtime services
A compiler that generates SWF files from MXML files.

Trevor was able to rewrite his current project interface, something that has taken months to develop, in a weekend. The prototype is remarkable.

I’ll post links to his work when it becomes publicly available.