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Usage of Perl, Python, and PHP Tools Declines in EMEA, Says Evans Data

In a stunning development that either signals a shift in open source in Europe regarding Web programming or a bad sampling of survey subjects, a new report by Evans Data indicates a dramatic drop off among European companies in regards to the deployment PHP, Perl, and Python in their software development projects.

According to the survey, the number of developers using PHP for application development dropped by 25 percent in the past year and the number of developers who said that they would not use or evaluate the use of PHP in their software projects rose by 40 percent. Perl usage also dropped by 20 percent and the number of developers who said they would not evaluate or use Perl in future projects also rose by 20 percent compared to this time last year. The Python programming language did not fare any better, with usage down 25 percent in the past 12 months and 17 percent fewer developers saying that they intend to use or evaluate the use of Python in future projects. John Andrews, Evans Data's chief operating officer, attributed the declines to a lack of enterprise-class support from platform providers (server, operating system, and middleware) for the Three Ps of open source. The survey polled 400 developers in EMEA in June.

It could be that what Web developers want is an integrated development environment that weaves together PHP, Perl, and Python in a single tool with enterprise-class support. Any takers to make the Three P Integrated Development Environment? Start with Eclipse and weave it in? Before you jump in, though, consider this: These tools have overlapping functions, are not necessarily easy to use, and perhaps cannot be integrated in an intelligent way. Maybe European developers really want .NET or Java? Or Cold Fusion/Flash/PDF? Or to work in management? Longer vacations than they already have?

SUSE Linux Coming to India in Native Languages

Commercial Linux distributor Novell announced last week that it had acquired the remaining 50 percent stake of Onward Novell, a joint with Onward Network Technologies that it didn't already own, and now the company is getting ready to ramp up local language versions of its SUSE Linux to attack the burgeoning Indian software market.

Novell has long been operating an Indian subsidiary, Novell India, in Mumbai to handle marketing of its products in that country, and has set up its only non-U.S. software development lab in Bangalore, which was established in 1994. About 10 percent of Novell's 5,800 employees are in India, and the partnership with Onward is reportedly the most profitable geographic unit at Novell.

The move coincides with Novell's preparations to deliver versions of Linux in Malyalam, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, and Hindi languages, which are spoken in different regions of India. Having been able to grow its market share in the Linux server market in China from 5 to 33 percent in a year, Novell wants to do the same thing in India, as well as get a foothold on the Linux desktop racket in India. Moreover, Novell wants to prevent an indigenous Indian Linux software supplier from getting ahead of it in this market, which will now only consume Linux, but use it to provide IT services and support for outsourcing.

Red Hat Bundles GFS with Fedora Core 4

Commercial Linux distro Red Hat has announced that its Fedora Project community Linux development effort will now have the company's Global File System (GFS) bundle with that development version. Specifically, Fedora Core 4 now includes the source code to GFS, which Red Hat got through the acquisition last year of Sistina Software, a maker of global file systems. GFS can run on 32-bit or 64-bit Linux on X86, X64, and Itanium platforms and can expand to cover 256 server nodes.

Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard announced two weeks ago that GFS could now be the core file system in a Serviceguard high availability cluster. Serviceguard is HP's own brand of clustering software, which it created for its HP-UX line of Unix servers and which it has subsequently ported to Linux. Red Hat GFS support for Serviceguard is available immediately.

HP and Novell Chase HPC Market with Mixed Open and Closed Stack

When SUSE was an independent Linux distro, it recognized very early that rival Red Hat, despite its enormously successful public offering and the war chest it gathered, could not cover every part of the server market, so SUSE started chasing the high-performance computing (HPS) supercomputer market. Both Cray and Silicon Graphics were helped tremendously by SUSE, and then Novell after it acquired SUSE, to make a Linux platform that could bend to the needs of HPC servers and parallel Linux clusters. These machines are anything but general purpose, even if they are more common these days.

Having a Linux kernel run properly on an HPC server or cluster is one thing, but having a completely certified stack of software is quite another. And that is why Hewlett-Packard and Novell have worked together to create an integrated, certified stack of Linux and related HPC software for customers deploying Linux supercomputers. The certified stack is based on HP's BladeSystem blade servers, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Scali's Manage/MPI Connect MPI clustering software, Altair's PBS Professional cluster workload management and job scheduling software, PolyServe's Matrix Server cluster file system and Cluster Volume Manager (which does just what the name suggests), DataSynapse's GRIDServer resource management software for financial services grids, United Devices' GRIP MP grid software for life sciences, TurboWorx' Site Builder, Enterprise Hub, and Cluster Manager for workflow and application performance monitoring, IBM's Meiosys MetaCluster HPC application virtualization software (which Big Blue just acquired), and Axcelon's Enfusion parametric scheduling and job management software. The validated platforms, which included a mix of open and closed source programs, Novell's Linux, and HP's iron, are available immediately from both HP and Novell.

OpenLogic Expands Through More Partnerships

OpenLogic, one of three major providers of commercialized open source software stacks for Linux and other platforms, has announced partnerships with MySQL, JBoss, and Covalent to provide front-end service for the MySQL database, JBoss application server, and various extended versions of the Apache Web server. OpenLogic already includes MySQL, JBoss, and Apache in the BlueGlue 3.2 open source software stack support service it launched earlier this year, but having deeper partnerships with these three organizations, it can offer deeper support as well. The partnerships will also allow OpenLogic to be more timely in its support of these products. For instance, MySQL has been shipping version 4.1 of its eponymous database since October of last year, but the BlueGlue stack only supports the MySQL 4.0.24 release. Ditto for JBoss, which is shipping a 4.0 release of its software, but BlueGlue is only supporting JBoss 3.2.7.

"Cell" Partners Try to Round Up Support for the Chip

In an effort to try to drum up licensees for the "Cell" derivative of the PowerPC architecture, IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, the three partners who co-developed the Cell chip, have released a flurry of technical specs to explain in detail the chip's architecture, its application binary interfaces, and how its C++ and Assembler compilers work. (If you want to read stuff that is way over my head, take a look at these documents at http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html.) The official name of the architecture is the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), and the three are pitching the Cell chip for game consoles, multimedia devices, and perhaps workstations and clusters for supercomputing jobs.

The 64-bit PowerPC core at the heart of Cell is somewhat simplified in that it does not, like the past many generations of PowerPC and Power processors from IBM, support out-of-order instruction execution. It has 32 KB each of instruction and data cache, a 512 KB L2 cache, and a Rambus XDR memory controller and I/O interface all implemented on the chip. The chip also includes eight synergistic processor units (SPUs), which are in effect vector math co-processors to boost the performance of streaming media and video calculations; they can do integer and floating point math, by the way. The Power core and the SPUs are connected to each other through a high-bandwidth element interconnect bus (EIB). Multiple Cell chips can be glued together to create compute clusters.

A single Cell chip has 235 million transistors, but thanks to the 90 SOI nanometer process IBM is using to make it, only cranks out about 80 watts as it delivers 256 gigaflops of number-crunching power when it runs at about 4 GHz and at 1.2 volts. Cutting the clock speed back to 3 GHz could drop the voltage and the heat way back--maybe as low as 50 to 60 watts running at 0.9 watts, but still delivering 192 gigaflops.

The question is this: What can you do with a Cell chip? Well, it would make a very good encryption co-processor or a special co-processor for handling any streaming media, that is for sure. There are undoubtedly other possibilities. Like running OS/400 natively on it and using the vector units to somehow goose database performance. But the chip may not have support for the special memory tags that OS/400 requires. This is still unclear.