IT Manager's Journal

The announcement last year that Apple was moving to Intel-based hardware might have seemed like a fatal blow to Terra Soft Solutions, a company best-known for the Yellow Dog Linux distro. However, Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft, says that the move may be a blessing in disguise. The company has moved on to bigger and better ventures -- including construction of the first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

The economic advantages delivered by grid technology are compelling many companies to move beyond discussion and into commercial pilots. Balancing workload by taking advantage of lightly used CPUs and providing system virtualization to improve application availability are two of the primary drivers behind the expanding adoption of a variety of processor grid technologies. And as infrastructure and tools to manage the process have matured, many organizations are ready to embrace the next innovation: the application grid, where even the most complex applications will be able to leverage distributed computing.

Businesses hoping to survive in today's marketplace should consider exchanging their old infrastructures for real-time infrastructures (RTI), according to Jim Groff, CEO at TimesTen, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of real-time infrastructure software.

Groff, whose comments came on the heels of Gartner Group remarks about the need for organizations to favor alternatives to IT infrastructures that respond too slowly to their needs, said businesses are moving toward real-time infrastructures as demands for rapid response, high scalability, and continuous availability become paramount.

The international battle for supercomputing supremacy has left the top spots to different nations in the last few twice-annual Top 500 lists, with the U.S. now reclaiming the title on the back of the new and improved BlueGene/L. But there is one constant among the most powerful computers on Earth, regardless of maker or region: Linux.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. figures it has three major steps to make in order to establish itself as the leading provider of enterprise and desktop software in the People's Republic of China.
Step 1: Put Java cards in as many pockets as possible.
Step 2: Own the desktop.
Step 3: Take over the rest of the enterprise stack.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The date was June 14, 2001. I remember it well; it was a hot, sunny day on the banks of the San Francisco Bay. Larry Ellison was explaining to a packed house of journalists, analysts, and assorted hangers-on at Oracle headquarters that the Oracle 9i he had just introduced was -- and I am quoting verbatim -- "the last database you'll ever need."

- By Robin 'Roblimo' Miller -
Sun's open source Grid Engine software currently runs over 7000 grids with an average of 47 CPUs per grid, and a steadily increasing percentage of the grids it powers run Linux, according to John Tollefsrud, Sun's Grid marketing manager.