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SGI Extends Linux to 256 Processors on Altix Supers

Recent Linux enthusiast and Unix supercomputer supplier SGI announced last week that it has been able to push the single system image size of its Itanium-based Altix 3000 supercomputers to 256 processors, quadrupling the scalability of that platform in 14 months. SGI says it plans to double that processor count to 512 by the end of the year, bringing its Itanium-Linux machines closer to parity with the RISC/Unix Origin line.

SGI's biggest ally in pushing the single system image size of the Altix 3000 Linux and Origin 3000 Irix machines has been NASA's Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California. The NASA facility has a 1,024-processor Origin 3800 server, and has pushed the Altix 3000 from its initial 64-processor configuration with a single shared memory, to a 128-processor setup in November 2003, to a 256-processor configuration last week. And it will be NASA Ames that helps SGI push the Altix line to a 512-processor system by the end of the year. Because the current "Madison" Itanium 2 processors are considerably more powerful than the MIPS RISC processors used in the Origin line, the Altix machines offer much better price/performance. The Origins have the virtue of running Irix and its applications, which have been a part of the supercomputing world for decades.

SGI says that customers who need more oomph today with Altix machines can deploy superclusters with up to 1,024 processors: that's four 256-ways with four distinct memory spaces clustered together like any other clustered Unix or Linux parallel server. Such a supercluster will be available for the Altix line this May.

The ability to put so many processors behind a single memory space is not new to SGI, but it does take some tweaking to make the NUMAflex architecture behind the Origin servers work with both the Itanium chips and the Linux operating system. NASA Ames had two 256-processor Origin 3800s, with about 410 gigaflops and 512 GB of shared memory in each half of the supercluster in early 2000, and later that year it had upgraded to two 512-processor nodes, with 1 TB of shared memory in each half. In July 2002, that machine was upgraded to the 600 MHz R14000A processors designed by SGI and made by NEC. That machine, with 1,024 processors, is rated at about 1.2 peak teraflops with about 853 teraflops on the Linpack Fortran benchmark test. It is telling that an Altix 3000 with 256 Madison Itanium processors running at 1.3 GHz, which sits right beside it at NASA Ames, is rated at 1.3 teraflops peak and about 1.1 teraflops on the Linpack test. That single system image for main memory makes both the Altix and the Origin machines very efficient, compared with other parallel architectures that more loosely couple processors together and do not have a shared single memory. It is not uncommon for parallel architectures to have 40 percent of the aggregate flops in a cluster go up the chimney because of latencies due to slow interconnect and partitioned memories.

To that end, SGI is counting on the shared memory architecture of the Altix machines to be its salvation in a rough-and-tumble server market, which has been turned upside down by the advent of cheap Linux clusters. According to SGI, on the SPECfpRate test, its Altix machines using 64 of Intel's 1.5 GHz Madisons can deliver 35 percent more oomph than a 64-processor Integrity Superdome machine from Hewlett-Packard using the same processors and the same number of them. The difference can largely be attributed to memory bandwidth.

HP Hits the High End of Expectations for Q1, Enterprise Storage and Servers Posts Operating Profit

Hewlett-Packard kept to its word and indeed did hit the high end of its estimate range for sales in the first fiscal quarter ended January 31, with sales of $19.5 billion, up 9 percent compared to this time last year. Net income was up 30 percent at $1.1 billion, with earnings of 30 cents a share, up 25 percent. Notably, the Enterprise Systems unit, which as the name suggests, sells HP's wide portfolio of Unix, Windows, Linux, and proprietary platforms and related storage and systems software, posted an operating profit after losing money for a few quarters at the operating level.

Specifically, the Enterprise Systems unit posted sales of $3.9 billion in the quarter, up 5 percent compared to last year, with an operating profit of $108 million, significantly better than the $82 million loss the unit had a year ago in fiscal Q1 2003. HP's software unit dragged down this sector, with an operating loss of $46 million, while the server and storage part of this unit booked an operating profit of $154 million. Unix server sales were down 13 percent in the quarter, with intense pricing pressure at both the high ends and low ends of the Unix market. Moreover, with HP known to be readying its PA-8800 dual-core processors, customers were not exactly inclined to buy before they saw what HP would do with pricing on these new CPUs and what kind of performance they would deliver. HP 9000 revenues were flat year-to-year, which is a sort of victory given the transition to the PA-8800, but sales of AlphaServers (running either OpenVMS or Tru64 Unix) were down 32 percent despite the rollout of the "Marvel" line of EV7 Alpha processors in the fall. The Marvel machines included a top-end 64-way GS1280 using 1.15 GHz processors and a new memory architecture that offer a factor of 16 greater memory bandwidth that significantly boosts performance for OpenVMS and Tru64. HP danced around how well the Itanium-based Integrity line did, saying that Superdome (the top-end Integrity machine) orders were up 52 percent and that sequential sales in fiscal Q1 2004 were up 60 percent over fiscal Q4 2003. Almost by default Integrity sales had to be up, and by a huge percentage, since Integrity sales were a miniscule part of HP's revenues last year. Overall, the Business Critical Systems unit--comprised of Integrity, Alpha, and NonStop systems--posted sales of $901 million in the quarter. Sales of X86-based ProLiant servers were up 15 percent to $1.96 billion, said HP, with shipments up 23 percent.

HP said that high-end and midrange storage sales were up 14 percent, driven in large measure by the new StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, which more than doubled in sales since last year. But high-end arrays that HP rebrands from Hitachi were weak, and the company's overall tape business declined by 5 percent as it exited the OEM tape library business. Overall, disk and tape storage sales (what HP calls Network Storage Systems) were $862 million, down 2 percent to compared to Q1 2003. Oddly enough, software sales were up 9 percent to $196 million, with HP hitting the highest software sales it has had in any first quarter. But these increased sales came at a cost, since this business posted a significant operating loss of $46 million.

The execs at HP might want to think about changing the fiscal year at HP, since it hurts its financials relative to rival IBM. HP's server sales were up 7 percent in Q1 and storage was down 2 percent. But these numbers include January, the worst month in the year to sell anything. If you recast HP's financials for an October-December 2003 quarter that matches IBM's, HP's server revenues were up 19 percent compared to IBM's 16 percent, and its storage sales were up 12 percent compared to IBM's 14 percent.

IP Telecom Joins Open Source Development Labs

IP Telecom, a Japanese Linux distributor that has created its own variant of Linux called Nature's Linux for service providers and other organizations that want to use Linux, has joined the Open Source Development Lab, which is the non-profit organization that is becoming the home base for Linux development.

IP Telecom was formed in January 2001 to promote the use of Linux in Japan, specifically a version of Linux it created called Nature's Linux, which IP Telecom claims is a more streamlined, robust, and easier to administer implementation of Linux. Last week, as IP Telecom was joining the ODSL, the company signed up 14 partners to join its own Nature's Linux Alliance, which is going to steer the course of Nature's Linux. The Japanese subsidiary of Sun Microsystems and the software unit of Fujitsu have also joined the NLA. Both of these companies are also in the OSDL, which also includes Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Novell (and SuSE), Red Hat, TurboLinux, and others.

Tsunami Debuts HiveCreator Clustering for Linux

Tsunami Research, a relatively unknown software company with a new twist on clustering that was formed two years ago, has announced that its HiveCreator clustering software now supports the Linux 2.4 kernel and has been certified to run Red Hat 8.0.

With the advent of HiveCreator, Tsunami, which is based in St Louis, Missouri and which was founded by people with expertise in creating sophisticated financial transaction systems that are highly available, is trying to introduce a new clustering concept it calls a hive. For you Star Trek fans out there, the hive concept will ring a bell, since it borrows heavily from the Borg, a hive composed of cybernetic-organisms that are assimilated into the hive forcibly in an effort to take over the galaxy. The idea of hives is that building super-reliable hardware and software components is foolish because no matter how good you make either, they will fail. A hive is comprised of what amounts to an uber-OS layer that rides on top of servers and allocates work to all machines in the cluster. The interesting bit about a hive--and this is something which all financial systems and fault-tolerant networks have and which most HPC-style Linux clusters do not--is that it has a sense of time. All nodes in the hive, which are called workers, know at all times what transactions are running and, more importantly, they know when they are not running well and can jump in and assume control of transactions that are getting bogged down. Tsunami says that it has also integrated self-healing application and network technologies into the hive software as well as an application abstraction layer to somewhat insulate application developers, who are working in C, C++, or Java applications, from the underlying platforms in the hive. The C/C++ compilers come in Windows and Unix flavors.

With the debut HiveCreator 1.0 version, Tsunami was supporting Windows XP, Windows 2000, and FreeBSD 4.7 and 4.8. With HiveCreator 2.0, support for Linux 2.4 has been added. Thus far, only Red Hat Linux 8.0 is certified, but Tsunami is working on Red Hat Enterprise V3 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.1. The company is also in the middle of certifying Windows 2003, and is pondering the possibilities of supporting HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, but has not made any commitments to let them join the hive. HiveCreator costs $2,000 per processor, with significant volume discounts.

Lilly Software Offers Money-Back Guarantee on Lean Manufacturing Suite

If you are in the manufacturing business, you might want to ponder a new offer from Lilly Software Associates. The company, which sells midrange ERP systems aimed at manufacturers on Linux, Unix, Windows, OS/400, and other proprietary platforms, has been pushing a set of add-ons to its Visual ERP suite, called Visual Easy Lean. These add on modules implement so-called "lean manufacturing" techniques, which is like just-in-time manufacturing on steroids and speed. Lilly Software is so confident that companies that implement Visual Easy Lean will see such good benefits that it is providing a money-back guarantee on the software license fees to installations of the program that do not meet the business-defined criteria within the first 180 days of implementation. Lilly says that customers can increase sales by an average of 10 percent, decrease lead times by as much as 90 percent, shrink inventories by 50 percent, and deliver products on time 90 percent of the time by using the lean manufacturing approach.

You can find out more about the "president's challenge" guarantee at lillysoftware.com/challenge.asp.

IBM Leads in Content Management Software

According to an analysis of the content management software market performed by WinterGreen Research, IBM is the market leader in terms of sales in the content management software market, with a 20 percent share of the market through the first three quarters of 2003. WinterGreen estimates that for the full year, content management software will account for a total of $1 billion in sales across all vendors, and forecasts that this market will grow to $2.1 billion by 2009. WinterGreen reckons that Documentum, acquired late last year by disk array maker EMC, was the number-two vendor in the content management software space, with 14 percent of the market in the first nine months of 2003, followed by Open Text with a 9 percent share. With no one vendor having a dominant position, it is still possible for a newcomer to enter the market, but both IBM and EMC have invested heavily in this space and intend to gain market share in the area. Microsoft certainly has aspirations in the CMS market, too, and has embrace the XML lingua franca that all of the other CMS players have adopted.

By the way, CMS software does more than manage HTML documents on a Web site, or at least enterprise-class CMS systems do. Increasingly, CMS programs have to manage XML documents, PDF documents, and various kinds of structured and unstructured data. One of the big drivers behind this market is having to comply with government reporting regulations, which force companies to archive information and communication over a long term.

Study: False Positives a Growing Problem for Spam Filters

Are your spam filters running amok? According to a new study by Return Path on the effects of spam filter technology, spam filters falsely identify nearly one in five legitimate e-mails as spam. Return Path, which has provided e-mail "change of address" and other e-mail related services to its clients since its founding in 1999, found that almost 19 percent of e-mail sent by its customers during the second half of 2003 never reached the inboxes of intended recipients and that spam filters were the main culprits. This represents a 3.7 percent increase in false positives compared with the same period in 2002, according to an AP story.