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Bull Launches New NovaScale Itanium Boxes

French server maker Bull has tweaked its line of Itanium-based NovaScale servers. The new NovaScale boxes are more compact than the existing machines, yet still use the high-end "Madison" Itanium processors from Intel.

The NovaScale servers are based on four-socket cell boards using the Intel 8870 chipset; these boards are glued together into systems that span from up to 32 processors currently (and will span 64 when dual-core "Montecito" Itaniums come out late this year for delivery in early 2006). The glue holding them together is Bull's own Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environments (FAME) NUMA clustering software and its related FAME Scalability Switch. (This is a similar architecture to that used by other server vendors to make big SMP boxes these days.) The first NovaScale servers were announced in March 2003: the NovaScale 4040, 5080, and 5160 servers, which supported 4, 8, and 16 Itaniums, respectively. In July 2004, Bull launched the 6000 series of servers--the 6080, 6160, and 6320 machines, which supported 8, 16, and 32 Itanium 2 processors and which offered physical partitioning at the cell board level. The machines support Red Hat and Novell Linux and Microsoft Windows. At the same time last summer, Bull also launched a port of its GCOS 8 mainframe environment for the NovaScales and offered two specific machines for running GCOS 8: the 9160 for 16-way processing and the 9320 for 32-way processing.

The new NovaScale 5085 and 6085 servers are not only more compact, but they start out with only two Itanium processors instead of the four in a base 5080 or 6080 box. The NovaScale 5085 and 6085 come in a 19U or 40U chassis. Into this chassis, you can slide in two four-way cell boards for a total of eight Itanium processors and from 2 GB to 64 GB of main memory per cell board. The 5085 has room for one I/O module, while the 6085 has room for two. Each I/O module has six PCI-X slots. The 5085 and 6085 chassis has room for four hot swap SCSI disks. (Bull has just partnered with SWsoft to use its Virtuozzo software partitioning to carve up the box beyond the four-way physical partitions supported in the NovaScale machines, by the way.)

In addition to the new Linux and Windows servers, Bull also has released two new GCOS 8 systems: the 9162 and the 9322, which will be available in June. These machines support GCOS 8 SR6.0, which can support a single GCOS 8 partition that spans across up to 12 processors. The new 9162 and 9322 NovaScales support up to 16 or 32 of Intel's 1.5 GHz or 1.6 GHz Itaniums (just like all the other NovaScales do); customers can carve these boxes up into eight-way physical partitions, and then put up to three logical partitions inside a physical partition. The resulting partitions can run GCOS 8, Linux, or Windows. Bull is limiting the number of Linux and Windows physical partitions on these machines to no more than three. A base 9162 costs 100,000 euros for a four-way box with 4 GB of main memory and four 73 GB disk drives.

Novell Donates $1.5 Million of SUSE Linux Software and Training to Educational Institutions

In an effort to help spur the use of Linux at colleges and universities, Novell announced last week that it will donate $1.5 million worth of SUSE Linux software and related training materials to educational institutions this year.

A centerpiece of the program is an introductory Linux training course that Novell's Training Services unit has put together for colleges and universities called "Getting Started with Linux: Novell's Guide to CompTIA's Linux+," which, as the name suggests, is a Linux course designed to give Linux newbies enough experience to pass CompTIA's entry-level Linux certification test. While the Novell course teaches technology and practices that are applicable across all Linux instances, you can bet that Novell is at least branding itself like crazy in the courses so Linux newbies think of Novell as the place to get commercial Linux.

Solaris-Sparc Bests Lintel Iron on OLTP Tests

Sun Microsystems is allergic to the TPC-C online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark test, but it nonetheless wants to prove its Solaris boxes are as good at OLTP jobs as other machines. So Sun did what a lot of server vendors have done over the ages: it came up with its own OLTP benchmark and it ran the test on one of its own machines and on a competitor's box, and then proclaimed itself the winner.

Specifically, Sun created an OLTP test it is calling iGEN_OLTP_v1.5 and ran it on a Sun Fire V440 server with four 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors; the server ran Solaris 10. Sun also ran a test on a four-way Dell 6650 server with 3 GHz Xeon processors (very likely 32-bit chips, but Sun doesn't say); this machine ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Sun says the Sun Fire box had a peak performance of 103,706 transactions per minute (TPM) gauging only the medium transactions running on the system. (There were also heavy transactions, which impacted the performance of the system running those medium transactions.) This compared favorably to a peak performance of 94,347 TPM on the Red Hat-Dell box. Somewhat inexplicably, Sun said that with 2,100 connections to the server (presumably this means end users), the Sun box ran at peak performance, but the Dell box became saturated and performance dropped to 68,005 TPM. Both servers were apparently running the open source MySQL database.

Here's the description of the OLTP benchmark Sun used: "iGEN_OLTP_v1.5 is a benchmark for measuring the throughput and response times of an OLTP database workload. This workload was based on customer applications and has a mix of light-weight and heavy-weight transactions. This benchmark is also used to show the performance of competitive systems under heavy load. The benchmark has two performance metrics: Throughput in tpmM (Medium transactions per minute) and average medium response time in seconds." I am trying to get a more detailed description of this benchmark and the source code to see what really is.

I think a new OLTP benchmark is a good idea--and so does the TPC, incidentally, as I have written about several months ago. (See "New TPC Benchmarks Are on the Horizon" from the October 7, 2004, issue of this newsletter.) However, throwing out a new benchmark without the specs, without an independent audit, and without giving the competition--in this case, Red Hat and Dell--a chance to make sure the tests were kosher is not particularly friendly or fair. That said, the animosity IBM created when it ran benchmarks on its AS/400 minicomputers and competing equipment from DEC and Hewlett-Packard in the late 1980s is what eventually lead to the creation of the TPC suite of benchmarks for OLTP workloads. Some good beyond PR could come from Sun's cheeky move.

Cray Posts Big Loss on Weak First Quarter

Supercomputer maker Cray has posted a loss of $21 million in its first quarter ended March 31 on sales of $37.6 million, down 11 percent. Cray posted a net loss of $3.8 million this time last year, and Wall Street is pretty jumpy that the company had such a big loss, which appears to be driven by weak sales and unexpectedly high research and development costs. In the past year, Cray rolled out three new product lines, and had hoped to be cashing in on them profitably by now. Jim Rottsolk, Cray's chairman and CEO, said the quarter was also impacted by manufacturing issues and it had fired IBM as the foundry for certain components. Delays in component shipments for its supercomputers have held down sales in past quarters; firing IBM cost Cray $1 million, and writing off other component inventories and "manufacturing variances" accounted for a total of $5 million in charges in the quarter. Rottsolk said its product inventory rose to $103.2 million in the quarter as the ramp of the X1E, XT3, and XD1 lines continued, and $37.3 million of that inventory was installed at customer sites awaiting customer acceptance so they can pay the bill and Cray can recognize the revenue. He said further that Cray has a $127 million backlog of orders for the next 12 months. Cray's difficulties in making money on its substantial engineering efforts and acquisitions (the XD1 was designed by the former OctigaBay) have made investors unhappy, and Cray's stock is now trading in the range of $1.50 a share, down from $8 a share a year ago. With a market capitalization of only $131 million, Cray is a prime target for a hostile takeover. The company's engineering knowledge alone is probably worth several multiples of the company's current value. Ironically, Cray paid $15 million in cash and $100 million in stock to acquire OctigaBay a little more than a year ago to get its hands on that company's innovative Linux-Opteron supercomputers before they hit the market.

In a separate announcement, Cray said it has hired Margaret Williams from rival IBM to become its senior vice president of engineering. Williams is a 20-year veteran of the supercomputing market, and she used to manage IBM's AIX and parallel computing software development. She was most recently a vice president of database technology within IBM's Software Group, but was also in charge of IBM's team at the Maui High Performance Computing Center in Hawaii, which is a supercomputer center for the U.S. Air Force that has two AIX-Power parallel SMP clusters as well as a Linux-X86 cluster. Williams will take over Cray's entire engineering effort, including the X1E, XT3, and XD1 lines as well as the advanced research projects code-named "Cascade" and "Rainier." Cascade is a long-term project that Cray has underway to reach the sustained petaflops (1,000 teraflops) performance range by 2010. Rainier is a project that is supposed to emerge in the 2006 to 2007 timeframe, and is based on heterogeneous computing, which probably means a mix of Cray servers (which have different architectures) working in concert on jobs.

Paul Otellini Takes Over CEO Post at Intel

Intel got a new chief executive officer last week during its annual shareholders meeting. Paul Otellini, currently Intel's president and chief operating officer, took the position from Craig Barrett, who becomes Intel's chairman. As the chipmaker's fifth top boss, Otellini will be charged with steering a new course for the company and putting the missteps of the last year behind it. In particular, Otellini will be expected to close the gap with rival AMD, which has beat the legendary chipmaker to market with two key technologies in recent years, including 64-bit extensions to the basic X86 architecture, and dual-core processors. Otellini is no newcomer to Intel, having been with the company for more than 30 years. He is, however, the first non-engineer to take the chief executive role.

Google Delivers Enterprise Desktop Search Tool

If you are tooling around with the various desktop search tools that are available to help you make sense of your messy desktop environment, search engine juggernaut Google has just launched a beta version of its desktop search tool aimed at enterprises. (Go to http://desktop.google.com/entpromo.html to check it out.)

While the regular desktop search tool, which is also still in beta, is aimed at indexing the contents on one desktop, the enterprise version of the tool can span your desktop, your company intranet, and the Google Web site and give you a single view of all that data. (So much for privacy, eh?) The enterprise search tool can encrypt data and search index files, and is capable of scanning Lotus/Domino email files, which the regular desktop version cannot. It also has a central point of control to allow and restrict access to end user machines.

IBM Adopts Firefox Broswer for Internal Use

IBM, one of the strongest backers of open-source software, is now encouraging its employees to use Mozilla's Firefox Web browser. About 10 percent of the company's 300,000 workers are now reportedly using Firefox, which has emerged as a worthwhile competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, which hasn't seen a major update in years. Although another 30,000 downloads of Firefox won't make a huge difference in IE's 95 percent-plus market penetration, observers say IBM's use internally gives Firefox more credibility and could spur others to give the open-source browser a shot. IBM executives say the move could save the company money by lessening dependence on proprietary software. Although IBM is still the largest purveyor of proprietary software the world has ever known, it has also been a generous donor of money and expertise to the development and maintenance of the Linux operating system, which, along with Microsoft's Windows, is slowly chipping away at the installed base of Unix servers and IBM midrange and mainframe servers.