Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

when hell freezes over ?

Sun has taken a beating lately, like everyone has, but when I look at its massively multicore Niagara and Victoria Falls systems I see real viable breakthrough in the area of massively parallel computing. With Solaris Containers on Sparc I can take an old production Solaris 8 ( or 9 ) server and literally drop it into a single core of a Niagara machine and then make the old box vanish into a puff of 1U smoke without losing anything. Heck, the new machines will run 256 threads at the same time with no time slice issues. With VirtualBox on x86 we can now park almost anything from the x86 world into a SunFire x4440 ( 16 core AMD Opteron slayer ) in 2U of rack space. The theory, that I would love to test in practice, is that you can make four racks of older gear vanish into 6U of rack space with the SunFire x4440 ( AMD Opteron based ) and the Sun T5440 Server ( 32 core and eight floating-point units per processor ). That would be 256 simultaneous threads all running in one server and 16 cores of AMD Opteron in the other. And that means Linux/Windows and Solaris all running in two machines. I may be wrong but Sun has a hell of a grip on the future multi-threaded world.

We had Joomla on Solaris working neatly also. That needs to be started up again as a simple to install package for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/?q=node/77