performanceGuru.com

2006-04-05T06:26:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-04-04

Virtualisation: OpenVZ Project Gets Migration Feature & Supports Fedora Core 5...

The OpenVZ virtualization project yesterday announced that one of the key goodies that has been shipping in the commercialized Virtuozzo virtualization tool for Linux and Windows will be made available to the open source OpenVZ community. That feature, ca

(tags: virtualisation openvz zones)
Virtualisation: Virtual Iron Standardizes on Xen & Goes Open Source...

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and emulate 'em. While Virtual Iron has some of the most sophisticated server virtualization technologies ever developed, what seems clear to most observers is that while VMware's closed source hypervisor inside its VMware

(tags: virtualisation virtual iron)
Virtualisation: XenSource Shifts Gears As It Rolls Out XenEnterprise Virtualization...

It was only a year ago when the open source Xen hypervisor project took LinuxWorld by storm and suddenly became one of the most important open source projects ever launched and a key piece of the Linux software stack. At the time, the company behind the p

(tags: virtualisation xen enterprise)
VOIP: Is Linux Voice Over IP Ready?

What is Voice over IP really? What do you need for Voice over IP? What do you mean, I can't call my girlfriend? What's all that buzz about open and proprietary protocols? Can I start my own telecom service? This article addresses these questions and compa

(tags: linux software voip)
Society: Marketing Versus Intention...

I rent a lot of cars. One reason for this is I travel a lot, mostly to conferences and meetings in other cities. Another reason is my own car, a late-80s Subaru wagon (the exact model year is a mystery not worth solving), can't be trusted on long trips. A

(tags: marketing economy business society)
Development: The Art Of Metaprogramming - Enterprise Metaprogramming...

Enterprise metaprogramming is becoming more common all the time as graphical and textual utilities make programming tasks easier and more descriptive, all because of the continuing formalization process occurring under the Object Management Group's Model

(tags: development modelling metadata)
Linux: Switching Art Students To GNU/Linux...

I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.

(tags: articles desktop gnu graphics image tools opensource photography powerpc software)
Mail: The Inner Working Of A Bayesian Spam Filter...

Before going further about how Bayesian filters work, let’s take a look at the history and the theory behind Bayesianism. The Bayesian theory was named after Reverend Thomas Bayes, a renowned British mathematician who lived in the 18th century.

(tags: analysis mail security software theory tutorial math spam filter)
Support: 10 Steps To A Better IT Support Process...

As an IT professional, you need to have a structured mind to be able to think through all the different problematic situations that can present themselves to you on a day to day basis.

(tags: articles busine)
Hardware: Niagara Versus Dell - ftp.heanet.ie Showdown...

So, after a week with the Niagara T2000, I’ve managed to find some time to do some more detailed benchmarks, and the results are very impressive. The T2000 is definitely an impressive piece of equipment, it seems very, very capable, and we may very well

(tags: apache benchmark cluster hardware performance server solaris sun tuning)
Virtualisation: The Future Of Application Virtualisation...

Desktop application virtualisation could quicken fixes, boost reliability and lower desktop support costs. Kevin White reports.

(tags: virtualisation desktop application)
HPC: Facing the Multi-Core Fear Factor...

The continuing opportunity presented by semiconductor technology trends characterized by Moore's Law also imposes significant challenges to processor, system, and software designers. The point of diminishing returns has been reached in the exploitation of

(tags: hpc multcore cpu articles)

2006-04-04T06:22:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-04-03

Hardware: The Big Drain - Where The Most Power Is Wasted...

APRIL 03, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Increasing power densities of networked storage, communications equipment and servers all contribute to the power and cooling problem. However, servers have become the biggest issue because server farms have grown so large

(tags: hardware heat power)
Systems: Splunk Sees Wiki As Troubleshooting Systems tool...

The idea behind the Wikipedia, a collaborative, community-built encyclopedia, is being applied by a tools vendor for untangling system problems.

(tags: systems management log analysis)
Hadrware: Plugging Into DC...

Industrial Light & Magic found an innovative way to gain power efficiencies and reduce heat in some of its blade-server racks.

(tags: hardware heat power dc)
Windows: Best Practices For Configuring Group Policy Objects...

Although group policies are an extremely powerful security mechanism, it can be a bit tricky to deploy them in an effective manner. That’s because the effective group policy is made up of multiple and sometimes contradictory group policy elements that a

(tags: windows group policy object best practice)
Virtualisation: Welcome To Vacademy...

The Virtualisation Academy (vacademy™) is a unique establishment that is an initiative supported by all the major virtualisation vendors in the market today. It offers a FREE service to organisations wishing to evaluate the opportunities presented by ad

(tags: virtualisation academy)
Java: Sun-Approved Open Source Java Making Progress...

THE COMMUNITY effort hosted by the Apache Software Foundation to create an open source, J2SE 5.0 compatible java runtime / virtual machine is progressing slowly but steadily. Despite some indifference and prejudice by some OSS pundits, the project has bee

(tags: java opensource sun)
Performance: Speed Your Code With The GNU Profiler...

Improving the performance of your applications is rarely a wasted effort, but it's not always clear which functions the program is spending most of its execution time on. Learn how to pinpoint performance bottlenecks using gprof for both user-space and sy

(tags: performance analysis profiling gnu)
Performance: Optimization - Your Worst Enemy...

First, a little background on me: my PhD was one of the earliest on the automatic creation of optimizing compilers from formal machine descriptions ("Machine-Independent Generation of Optimal Local Code", CMU Computer Science Department, 1975). After my P

(tags: algorithms development language optimisation performance profiling)

2006-04-03T06:23:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-04-02

Virtualisation: The Need for Virtualization & Xen...

"Computers are never fast enough." That used to be the mantra of computer users everywhere. Then, CPU manufacturers hit the 1GHz barrier and, for most users, it stopped being true. Unless you are playing the latest games, performing scientific computation

(tags: virtualisation xen paravirtualisation articles)
Hardware: A Faster, Denser Hard Drive Debuts...

MARCH 31, 2006 (PC WORLD) - The reorientation of hard drives has begun: The first drives to use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to pack more data into less space are out. And our tests reveal that they not only boost storage capacity but

(tags: storage pmr)

2006-03-31T06:23:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-03-30

Hardware: Fujitsu Extends Blade Server To Eight-Way SMP...

The Fujitsu-Siemens partnership dabbed its toe into the market for Opteron-based servers last fall with a two-socket rack server and a blade server that made use of the HyperTransport interconnect to lash blades together into symmetric multiprocessing (SM

(tags: hardware blade smp)
Performance: Dtrace & Locking Example..

Andrew Tridgell wandered over to our stand at LinuxWorld on Tuesday to ask about DTrace and look at some problems that he was having. We uploaded the source to one of his performance tests, built it and started to have a look. The test in question is lock

(tags: solaris dtrace performance analysis locking)
Java: Good Housekeeping Practices...

Garbage collection is nearly everyone's favorite feature of the Java™ platform; it simplifies development and eliminates entire categories of potential code errors. But while garbage collection generally allows you to ignore resource management, sometim

(tags: development java)
Linux: Distributed Multihead Support With Linux & Xdmx...

Learn about the tools available to develop your own multiscreen configuration and physical layout to enhance your computing experience. You can use Linux® and Xdmx to create one contiguous desktop across multiple display devices attached to separate comp

(tags: linux display server multi head distributed)
Web: SEO Basics - Part 1 - Improve Your Standing In Search Engines...

Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you'll receive a foundation in search

(tags: engine google optimisation search web)
Web: SEO Basics - Part 2 - SEO Keyword & Infrastructure Strategies...

Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you learned the background of why whi

(tags: engine google optimisation search web)
Web: SEO Basics - Part 3 - Get Your Web Pages Into Search Indexes...

Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 3 of the series, you'll learn how to get

(tags: search web optimisation)
Web: SEO Basics - Part 4 - Improve Search Marketing For Large Sites...

Making your Web site obvious to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In this final part of the series, learn specialized

(tags: engine ibm search)
Development: Developing with Apache Derby - Hitting the Trifecta...

Want to start using Apache Derby right now? This multi-part series featured in the "Developing with Apache Derby: Hitting the Trifecta" column will get you up and running with the Derby database in no time. This first installment introduces the basic conc

(tags: development database apache derby)
Architecture: Introducing The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)...

TOGAF provides architects a methodology for gaining control over enterprise architecture and IT. Learn about this important industry standard.

(tags: architecture framework enterprise)
Performance: Performance Monitoring With Enterprise Workload Manager...

To meet real-world business commitments, gathering detailed statistics of the transactions in your environment can be critical. Learn how you can set up end-to-end performance monitoring in a functional IBM Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM) domain and se

(tags: performance analysis monitoring arm)
Combining Service-Oriented Architecture and Event-Driven Architecture using an Enterprise Service Bus

Today's business applications rarely live in isolation. They need to be connected in order to create an integrated solution from which an organization can derive value. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) are two differ

(tags: esb ibm soa development architecture event driven)
Sys Admin > v15, i14: Worldwide Access to Your Serial Consoles

Imagine being able to reboot a server from the system console from Europe or at an airport during a layover. Imagine not having to physically be present at your datacenter to perform tasks that require console access but, instead, doing them in the comfor

(tags: opensource console remote management)
Management: Console Design Considerations

This article will cover some of the more common design criteria and best practices you should consider when designing and acquiring a console infrastructure. Console servers, although little known outside the datacenter, provide key services to quick reco

(tags: systems management console server)
Virtualisation: Red Hat Lines Up Enterprise Linux Virtualization Edition...

Linux distributor Red Hat Inc is likely to introduce a new edition to its Enterprise Linux product family to allow the operating system to be competitively priced when hosted in virtualized environments.

(tags: virtualisation redhat rhel news)

2006-03-30T06:24:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-03-29

Autonomic: Under New Management...

In an increasingly competitive global environment, enterprises are under extreme pressure to reduce operating costs. At the same time they must have the agility to respond to business opportunities offered by volatile markets. Leveraging IT for competitiv

(tags: autonomic computing management software)
Tools: Using Top More Efficiently...

For desktop users, monitoring resource usage is an important task. By doing this, we can locate system bottleneck, planning what to do to optimize our system, identifying memory leak and so on. The problem is, which software one should use and how to use

(tags: linux tools performance statistics tuning utility)
Business: The Service Summary...

MARCH 29, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - In my last column, I walked through the basic areas that a service provider’s service-level agreement should cover: the service summary, security and design reviews, hardware, software, service availability, service requ

(tags: service level agreement)
Development: Programming Language Comparison...

What follows is my personal evaluation and comparison of many popular programming languages. It is intended to provide very high-level information about the respective languages to anyone who is trying to decide which language(s) to learn or to use for a

(tags: development language reference comparison)
Development: KProf - Profiling Made Easy...

KProf is a visual tool for developers, which displays the execution profiling output generated by code profilers. The output of profilers being usually difficult to read (beyond the flat profile information), KProf presents the information in list- or tre

(tags: profiling software tools)
Hardware: Fujitsu Extends Blade Server To Eight-Way SMP...

The Fujitsu-Siemens partnership dabbed its toe into the market for Opteron-based servers last fall with a two-socket rack server and a blade server that made use of the HyperTransport interconnect to lash blades together into symmetric multiprocessing (SM

(tags: hardware blade smp)

2006-03-29T06:23:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-03-28

Data: Storage Statistics...

MARCH 27, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - These downloadable PowerPoint slides offer statistics on stored data encryption, storage market leaders and storage administrator salaries. A part of Computerworld's special reports and Knowledge Centers, Data Points are a

(tags: storage statistics data)
Grid: Vendor Group Offers Storage & Data Requirements For Grids...

MARCH 27, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) today released its data and storage provisioning requirements for enterprise grids as part of its ongoing effort to foster development of interoperable grid products and best practices.

(tags: storage grid distributed computing)
Security: Snort On OpenWrt - Guarding The SOHO Perimeter...

If you're edgy about security for your SOHO LAN, you might want to consider moving your first line of defense out past your firewall. How about on your router, for example? If your router runs OpenWrt, you can do exactly that, by running Snort, the open s

(tags: linux networking security wireless ids)
Podcasting: Mastering podcasts with Audacity...

Open source software makes podcasting easy -- too easy. Listening to a playlist of first-timer podcasts can leave your ears ringing from sudden changes in playback volume. The problem is audio mastering. Recording sound is simple, but mastering that sound

(tags: desktop linux software audacity podcast)
Hardware: Azul to go 48-core with Vega 2...

While the X86 world hops from one to two processing cores, startup Azul Systems plans to integrate 48 cores on its second-generation Vega chip, expected next year.

(tags: hardware java)
Gaming: Sun's Project Darkstar Aims For Gaming Services...

Sun Microsystems is trying to use a variation of its Sun Grid to get a foothold in the online gaming industry. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server and software company started sharing details about its Project Darkstar at the Game Developer Conference la

(tags: sun grid gaming)
Database: How To Set Up A Load-Balanced MySQL Cluster | HowtoForge...

This tutorial shows how to configure a MySQL 5 cluster with three nodes: two storage nodes and one management node. This cluster is load-balanced by a high-availability load balancer that in fact has two nodes that use the Ultra Monkey package that provid

(tags: administration cluster configuration installation linux mysql server tutorial)
Security: How To Install A Custom Iptables Firewall...

This guide is to show you how to edit your iptables if you're running on a server This guide info came from iptables rocks, but i edited a bunch of data to make it suitable for what i want it to do

(tags: linux security firewall iptables tutorial)

2006-03-28T06:25:00.000+01:00

links for 2006-03-27

Business: Best Practice BPM...

Just as BPM (business process management) technology is markedly different from conventional approaches to application support, the methodology of BPM development is markedly different from traditional software implementation techniques. With CPI (continu

(tags: business process management)
Hardware: Navigating the Memory Upgrade Jungle...

There has never been a better time to increase memory capacity. Consider that the increased use of memory-intensive applications such as video encoders has already caused 1 GB configurations to go mainstream.

(tags: hardware memory upgrade)
Development: Simplifying Cluster Application Programming Using Interface Classes...

In part 3 of this series, we take a closer look at a cluster-based text-file analysis utility that has been implemented using both the Message Passing Interface (MPI) system and the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) library. The utility is a simple cluster a

(tags: cluster development mpi pvm)
Development: 64-Bit Technology - Is It Greek To You?

Software engineering issues notwithstanding, the migration to 64-bit architectures poses new challenges in the linguistic domain as well. Join me in a brief lesson in memory storage jargon, the interesting etymology behind it and -- a pinch of Greek.

(tags: development 64 bit)
Programming: The Algorithm Structure Design Space in Parallel Programming...

The first phase of designing a parallel algorithm consists of analyzing the problem to identify exploitable concurrency, usually by using the patterns of the Finding Concurrency design space.

(tags: development parallel mpi pvm patterns)
Development: The Joys Of Concurrent Programming - What Is Concurrency?

The software development process now requires a working knowledge of parallel and distributed programming. The requirement for a piece of software to work properly over the Internet, on an intranet, or over some network is almost universal.

(tags: development concurrency mpi pvm)
Hardware: Hypertransport Co-Processors Take Us Back To The 8087...

THE SON of the Alpha EV7 bus, also known as Hypertransport these days, aimed to provide for very versatile functionality from Day One. That's whether we talk about cache-coherent NUMA-like SMP (but without most of NUMA latency penalties), or high-performa

(tags: amd hardware hypertransport fpga clearcase)
HPC: Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing - A Paradigm Shift...

"Adaptive supercomputing will cause a paradigm shift in the way users select and use HPC systems. Adaptive supercomputing is necessary to support the future needs of HPC users as their need for higher performance on more complex applications outpaces Moor

(tags: hpc cray fpga)
HPC: Accelerating Data Transport Over Hybrid Networks...

As a number of large-scale, multinational experiments prepare to go online in the next 2-3 years, a new generation of data retrieval and transmission techniques and tools will be required. The data yielded by these experiments will be prolific, and a dive

(tags: hpc networking)

2006-03-25T05:25:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-24

Virtualisation: A Virtualization Primer Paradigm Shifting In The Data Center With Open Standard Virtualization...

Manufacturing companies expend significant effort to maximize the efficient use of their manufacturing infrastructure: factories should be running at or near capacity, warehouses should be no bigger than necessary to fill shipping containers as fast as po

(tags: vmware xen virtualisation)
Hardware: Sun’s T2000 “Coolthreads” Server - First Impressions & Experiences...

, based on the UltraSparc T1 CPU, sparks our curiosity. For years, x86 servers have been gobbling up the server market share fast, forcing the RISC vendors – who don’t have the same economies of scale – to retreat to niche markets. First, the low en

(tags: niagara sun hardware)
Hardware: RAMP - FPGA...

Processor architectures have crossed a critical threshold. Manufactures have given up attempting to extract ever more performance from a single core and instead have turned to multi-core designs. However, little is known on how to build, program, or manag

(tags: fpga reconfigurable computing cpu hardware)

2006-03-24T05:25:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-23

Hardware: Physics Acceleration - The Next Big Thing™?

After keeping quiet for months, Ageia is using the 2006 Game Developers Conference as a platform to deliver actual cards and supporting software for its PhysX physics acceleration unit (or PPU). Systems are shipping today with PhysX cards from Falcon Nort

(tags: hardware reconfigurable computing)
Development: Michael Robertson Fires First Salvo Of Software Revolution With AjaxWrite...

In a blog post on his own site, Michaels Robertson announced yesterday that a new AJAX word processor called ajaxWrite was available for immediate use, and that this would be the future of software delivery. In fact, it's the first of several-the site des

(tags: ajax development news)
Oeponsource: Apache's Greg Stein Says Commercial Software's Days Are Numbered...

MARCH 23, 2006 (INFOWORLD) - The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open-source becomes the preferred choice, Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, said at the EclipseCon 2006 conference ye

(tags: opensource apache news)
Virtualisation: Virtual obscurity...

ARCH 22, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - I have long been a proponent of virtualizing everything and at every level in the storage space. Whether at the host, network or storage level, I too often see nothing but blue skies and fields of green when it comes to sto

(tags: virtualisation storage performance)
Perl: Command Line Perl For Sysadmins...

Using perl -e allows you to specify a script right on the command line. It's a powerful, underused feature even for people who use Perl regularly. Perl's powerful command line options make it a more flexible replacement for sed, awk, and even vi. Combine

(tags: perl cli administration system)
Security: Sun Grid Hit By Network Attack...

Sun Microsystems' Grid, a publicly available computing service, was hit by a denial-of-service network attack on its inaugural day, the company said on Wednesday.

(tags: sun grid security)

2006-03-23T05:24:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-22

Hardware: Sun Expands OpenSPARC Program...

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun Microsystems is putting out more information on the chip.

(tags: sun opensparc hardware cpu)
Business: BI's Founding Father Speaks - Q&A With Howard Dresner...

Howard Dresner invented the term "business intelligence" in 1989. In 1992, Dresner joined Gartner, Inc. where he built up the analyst firm's BI practice and created and chaired the annual Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. In the fall of 2005, Dresner

(tags: business intelligence howard dresner)
Virtulisation: The Perfect Xen 3.0 Setup For Debian...

Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are

(tags: xen virtualisation howto tutorial)
Linux: The Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) Project...

Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) allows you to use inexpensive hardware to control your Linux PC with a TV remote control. Why would you want to control your PC with a TV remote control? A number of reasons are possible, the most obvious being MythTV,

(tags: linux howto tutorial remote control infrared)
Hardware: How CRT & LCD Monitors Work...

We all spend an awful lot of time sat in front of computers. Whether we're gaming or working, we are at the mercy of what many would argue is the most important element of any system - the monitor. A well-defined monitor can make using a system a pleasure

(tags: hardware lcd monitor)
Performance: The Adventures Of Scaling - Stage 2...

While a couple of high-traffic sites are being powered by Rails and while the Rails book has a handful of instructions to scale your application, it was apparent for us that you’re on your own at a certain point. This series of articles is meant to serv

(tags: ruby rails performance scalability)
Performance: Performance Tuning SLES

The session was about optimization of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server without losing vendor support and certification.

(tags: performance tuning sles)

2006-03-22T05:25:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-21

Virtualisation: Whitepaper Repository...

Most all leading IT shops are using Terminal Servers for at least some of their application deployments. TMurgent Technologies develops tools and software products to compliment what corporations are doing with Terminal Servers today.

(tags: virtualisation performance vmware xen citrix terminal services)
Business: The Author Of Reengineering The Corporation Provides Some Tips...

When Mike Hammer and I published Reengineering the Corporation in 1992, we understood the impact that real business process change would have on people. I say “real” process change, because managers have used the term reengineering to describe any and

(tags: business reemgineering process)

Dtrace Get A New Provider - nfs4trace...

2006-03-21T21:45:00.000Z

I think the release announcement says it best:

Introduction
nfs4trace is a DTrace provider for NFSv4. The probes and their arguments are a nearly one-to-one mapping with the NFSv4 protocol.

Familiarity with the D language and the NFSv4 protocol will allow you to use nfs4trace to profile, debug, or otherwise analyze the OpenSolaris NFSv4 client or server. Some possible uses:

profile NFSv4 compounds
collate by tag, address, …
gather their frequency, duration, …
snoop-like functionality without the problems of the physical network
encrypted packets
packet fragmentation
which interface(s) to watch
watch for interesting events
activity on the callback channel
delegations issued, recalled, returned
locking, errors, lease renewals, state recovery, …
A kernel developer can combine these probes with the rest of the DTrace probes to do very in-depth analysis.

For those lacking familiarity of D and/or NFSv4, there will be example D scripts that make use of nfs4trace. Watch the announcements section for details as they become available.

So go play and help improve this provider, as well as the NFS implementation in OpenSolaris - go on, you know it makes sense...

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nfs4trace/

2006-03-21T05:30:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-20

News: Network Management As Core Competency...

MARCH 20, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Network World's IT Roadmap conference kicks off Monday in Boston, and the network management track appears to be the most popular one that attendees have pre-registered for. Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Assoc. will lea

(tags: network management news)
Performance: Tracking System Performance With sar...

Sar is the "system activity report" program found on *nix systems. In Linux, you can usually find it in the sysstat package, which includes programs and scripts to capture and summarize performance data, then produce detailed reports. This suite of progra

(tags: performance analysis management linux)
Architecture: A Life Of Service...

While pundits argue about when Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) will take over the world, there is a reasonable consensus that this is the way much of the business IT implementations world is moving. Given that, the world of the applications developer

(tags: soa architecture)
Grid: God Smiles On Sun & Delivers Grid Computing Miracle...

At long last, Sun Microsystems will fire up its retail grip computing service and give any US customer access to a supercomputer class system.

(tags: sun grid distributed computing news)
Using JConsole to Monitor Applications

The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 release provides comprehensive monitoring and management support. It not only defines the management interfaces for the Java virtual machine, but also provides out-of-the-box remote monitoring and managemen

(tags: jmx java performance monitoring management)
Linux: Novell Lays Out Its Plans for OES & Linux at BrainShare 2006...

Novell kicked off its BrainShare 2006 customer and partner conference in Salt Lake City yesterday, and the company's top brass spent the opening keynote sessions explaining Novell's technology and business strategy, often reiterating themes we have had he

(tags: novell linux news)
Hardware: Intel Launches Low-Power Xeon LV Chip for Servers...

As Intel promised it would do at the big Intel Developer Forum shindig a few weeks ago, the company last week delivered its first very low power Xeon chip for servers, one that consumes a lot less electricity and generates a lot less heat than a normal Xe

(tags: intel news cpu hardware)
Hardware: HP Announces High-End 'Arches' Chipset For Integrities...

There is no doubt that Hewlett-Packard was hoping to make a big splash with its third generation "Arches" sx2000 chipset for Itanium servers and launch the Integrity servers based on the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors as a single package. But wi

(tags: hewlett packard itanium hardware news)
Virtualisation: Red Hat Isn't Exhibiting 'Xen'-Ophobia...

Red Hat's announcement March 14 of its integrated virtualization push, starring Xen, didn't take anyone by surprise: Red Hat, along with just about everybody else, has been tooting the Xen horn ever since the fledgling open-source virtualization technolog

(tags: xen virtualisation redhat news)

2006-03-20T05:23:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-19

Tools: Gantt Project...

The Gannt Project is a Java based Project Management tool.

(tags: java opensource management business office)
Performance: JDiskReport...

JDiskReport enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders.

(tags: disk storage tool java linux windows)
Grid: Sun Girds For Grid – Again...

THE LONG and meandering road towards Sun’s Grid Compute Utility chould take another turn next week with the opening up of the service to the man on the Clapham omnibus. It might be wise to note the conditional tense though - this has been one of the mos

(tags: sun solaris grid distributed computing utility)
Development: Creating DSLs With Ruby...

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to create a DSL. One is to invent a syntax from scratch, and build an interpreter or compiler. The other is to tailor an existing general-purpose language by adding or changing methods, operators, and default actions.

(tags: dsl ruby tutorial development)
Virtualisation: The Virtualization API...

Libvirt is a C toolkit to interract with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). It is free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Virtualization of the Linux Operating System means the abilit

(tags: xen virtualisation development python library)
Security: Top 75 Network Security Tools...

In May of 2003, I conducted a survey of Nmap users from the nmap-hackers mailing list to determine their favorite security tools. Each respondent could list up to 8. This was a followup to the highly successful June 2000 Top 50 list. An astounding 1854 pe

(tags: tools security directory networking)
Virtualisation: Detecting The Presence Of Virtual Machines Using The Local Data Table...

In this paper we describe a method for determining the presence of virtual machine emulation in a non-privileged operating environment. This attack is useful for triggering anti-virtualization attacks and evading analysis. We then discuss methods for miti

(tags: virtualisation security root kit detection)

2006-03-18T05:28:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-17

Web: Configuring Apache For Maximum Performance...

Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU etc. But, most of the time, the same result can be achieved by custom configuration of the server. This article looks into getting maximum performanc

(tags: apache performance tutorial)
Shell: Safely Sharing Screen Sessions With sudo...

This month, Rod Knowlton addresses a sudo security problem that John Spurgeon and I introduced in our "Using Screen in Scripts" column. Rod describes the problem as "small"; we feel he's being too kind.

(tags: shell tutorial development)

2006-03-17T05:24:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-16

Performance: Meaningful Benchmarks...

In order to have meaningful conclusions drawn from a benchmark test, several 'rules' need to be followed. There are a number of web sites which provide information on what constitutes good benchmarking, what benchmarks are available and their general usef

(tags: benchmark performance methodology framework)
Performance: Benchmarking - The Money Game...

OK, here is where I piss off readers, other publications and even manufacturers. I believe that there are way too many hardware publications and authors that just don't get it. They don't get it because their readers either don’t get it either. And they

(tags: performance benchmark articles methodology framework)
Grid: The Desktop as a Grid Service...

This article is about two time-tested ideas that rightly refuse to die. The first one is time sharing. The second one is about a way to manage complexity: Because some problems require inherently complex solutions, often the best approach is to move that

(tags: sun java grid distributed computing virtualisation)
Here come the change architects

BEA founder and CEO Alfred Chuang was in New York recently when news came through that JP Morgan was selling its BrownCo business to eTRADE for $1.6bn.

(tags: soa strategy architecture)
Performance: Hidden in Plain Sight - Dtrace Article...

In December 1997, Sun Microsystems had just announced its new flagship machine: a 64-processor symmetric multiprocessor supporting up to 64 gigabytes of memory and thousands of I/O devices. As with any new machine launch, Sun was working feverishly on ben

(tags: solaris performance observability dtrace analysis tuning)
The adventures of scaling, Stage 1

While a couple of high-traffic sites are being powered by Rails and while the Rails book has a handful of instructions to scale your application, it was apparent for us that you’re on your on at a certain point. This series of articles is meant to serve

(tags: rails ruby performance tuning scalability)
Multithreading in the Solaris Operating Environment

Multithreading is a popular programming and execution model that allows multiple threads to exist within the context of a single process, sharing the processÕ resources but able to execute independently. The threaded programming model provides developers

(tags: solaris threads whitepaper performance)
News: Sun CIO Juggles Tight Budgets...

MARCH 16, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - You might expect a leading Silicon Valley technology vendor like Sun Microsystems Inc. to spend, if not lavishly, at least more than the average company on its own internal IT.

(tags: sun news)
Development: Writing Serious Perl - The Absolute Minimum You Need To Know...

Perl's extremely flexible syntax makes it easy to write code that is harder to read and maintain than it could be. This article describes some very basic practices I consider necessary for a clear and concise style of writing Perl.

(tags: articles development perl tutorial)
Performance: JIP The Java Interactive Profiler...

JIP is a code profiling tool much like the hprof tool that ships with the JDK.

(tags: java performance profiler tools)
Tools: Creating Repositories & Projects in Subversion...

This article explains how to create projects and repositories in a free, open source version control system called Subversion. The online documentation for Subversion is excellent, but the information found here may help people who are still getting up to

(tags: repository subversion tutorial scm)

2006-03-16T05:28:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-15

Virtualisation: Red Hat Enters State Of Xen...

Red Hat is going up against Novell by beefing up its support for Xen's hypervisor, bringing virtualization technology to a "mass market."

(tags: virtualisation redhat rhel xen)
Virtualisation: Wyse & VMware Team Up On 'virtualized PCs'...

MARCH 14, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Wyse Technology Inc. and VMware Inc. said today that they will work together to create virtualized PCs that can be hosted and managed on inexpensive Intel-based servers.

(tags: virtualisation vmware thin computing client)
Performance: DTrace Script For Getting Call Stacks...

The following DTrace script really helped me nailing down some lock contention issue, that I was looking into, at work. This simple script records all the call stacks, upto 60 frames, whenever a call has been made to lwp_*() API, explicitly or implicitly.

(tags: dtrace solaris performance locking)
Windows: Basic Blue Screen Debugging...

Doug Allen: Hi and I'd like to welcome everyone to today's presentation of Basic Blue Screen Troubleshooting. My name is Doug Allen and I'm a Support Professional with Microsoft Premier Product Support Services Setup Team here in North Carolina. I'd like

(tags: windows kernel crash dump analysis)
Development: Knowing What to Build and Why...

Whether or not you want to believe it, the vast majority of software projects fail. They fail to live up to their customers’ expectations, fail to sufficiently support the activities they were conceived to make easier, and fail to gain the ever-elusive

(tags: development methodology framework)
Development: C++ Modularity with Namespaces and Exception Handling...

The advent of XML has highlighted the importance of namespaces in the data domain. Namespaces also play an important role in C++, specifically in compartmentalizing code. They’re easy to use and they provide numerous benefits such as readability and imp

(tags: c++ development namespace exception handling)
Hardware: Reconfigurable Computing - A Survey of Systems & Software...

Due to its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of applications, reconfigurable computing has become a subject of a great deal of research. Its key feature is the ability to perform computations in hardware to increase performance, while retaini

(tags: fpga reconfigurable computing hardware)
Performance: JRat - The Java Runtime Analysis Toolkit...

JRat is the Java Runtime Analysis Toolkit. Its purpose is to enable developers to better understand the runtime behavior of their Java programs. The term "behavior" includes, but is not limited to performance profiling.

(tags: java analysis performance profiler runtime testing tool)
Development: What Is In Your Performance Toolkit?

I ran across a list of tools that an outsourcing company says they use to determine scalability and performance problems in their customer's code. It is an impressive list. What's in your toolkit?

(tags: monitoring testing profiling performance java)
Hardware: Intel's Next Generation Microarchitecture Unveiled...

Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) for Spring 2006 has a rather obvious focus: the announcement of Intel’s next generation microarchitecture. Intel’s new core will almost certainly leapfrog arch-rival AMD for integer and commercial computing performance.

(tags: intel cpu internals articles news)
News: Low power is future for high-powered servers...

MARCH 15, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - HANOVER, Germany -- The electricity consumed by a server over its lifetime is likely to cost as much as the server itself if energy costs continue to rise, according to one analyst. That should make energy efficiency a

(tags: hardware heat power)
News: First Look - Fedora Core 5...

The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest program

(tags: redhat fedora news)
Application: Dogtail - Taking Your Application For A Walk...

dogtail is a GUI test tool and automation framework written in Python. It uses Accessibility (a11y) technologies to communicate with desktop applications. dogtail scripts are written in Python and executed like any other Python program.

(tags: development linux python testing tool gui)

2006-03-15T05:28:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-14

Grid: Sun's Bjorn Andersson Gives Insight Into Big Wins...

GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris spoke with Bjorn Andersson, Sun Microsystems' director of HPC and Grid computing, about what's going on with the company in terms of its Grid and HPC initiatives. Andersson discusses Sun's big customer win for its Sun Grid

(tags: sun grid distributed computing hpc)
Virtualisation: Virtualization's Real Impact...

As founder and chief scientist at VMware Inc., Mendel Rosenblum has been in the thick of the development of virtualization technologies. He recently spoke with Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell and discussed how virtualization is changing the IT landscap

(tags: virtualisation vmware)
News: Mellanox Drives 10Gb/s InfiniBand Into Data Centers At Enterprise Gigabit Ethernet Prices...

A single InfiniBand HCA card in each server and storage node is the only I/O adapter required to interconnect a highly scalable and reliable grid, as opposed to several multi-port Enterprise Gigabit Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs. InfiniBand I/O con

(tags: infiniband storage virtualisation mellanox)
Virtualisation: VMware Tools for Solaris 10...

Solaris 10 has experimental support or can at least be installed on almost any VMware version, but VMware doesn't provide a VMware Tools package for Solaris 10. This page provides an implementation of vmware-guestd, vmware-toolbox and vmware-user for Sola

(tags: solaris vmware tools)
Virtulisation: Ultimate-P2V...

Ultimate-P2V (fix-vmscsi) is a free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine - and perform the neccessary “system reconfiguration” required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machi

(tags: vmware tools p2v)
Virtualisation: VMware Virtual Machine Importer...

VMware is proud to announce the Beta availability of Virtual Machine Importer 2.0, the latest desktop utility for IT professionals and software developers/testers working with virtual machines. VMware Virtual Machine Importer (VMI) is a freely available,

(tags: tools virtualisation vmware)
Virtualisation: VMWare ESX Server LUN Security...

VMware ESX Server provides strong security and performance isolation for virtual machine storage. Each virtual machine sees only the virtual disks that have been presented to its virtual SCSI adapters. Virtual machines cannot see the physical Fibre Channe

(tags: vmware storage security whitepaper)
Agile programming has fallen short, conference told - Computerworld

gile software development, which aims to offer a much quicker style of delivering software than traditional methods, has not yet met its promise, Steve McConnell, author and chief software engineer at Construx Software Builders, told the the SD West 2006

(tags: development agile methodology)
Linux: Red Hat shows off Enterprise Linux 5

Red Hat has announced the beta release of RH Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), which will now include virtualisation.

(tags: rhel linux news virtualisation)
Virtualisation: RedHat Resource Center...

Red Hat's strategy is to help customers methodically drive costs out of infrastructure. Virtualization technology can help customers lower costs by optimizing and increasing utilization of computing systems. We designed the Virtualization Resource Center

(tags: virtualisation rhel redhat linux tools)
Performance: Build Your Own Profiling Tool...

Profiling is a technique for measuring where software programs consume resources, including CPU time and memory. In this article, software architect Andrew Wilcox explains the benefits of profiling and some current profiling options and their shortcomings

(tags: performance profiling toolkit java)
Access the Linux kernel using the /proc filesystem

The /proc filesystem is a virtual filesystem that permits a novel approach for communication between the Linux® kernel and user space. In the /proc filesystem, virtual files can be read from or written to as a means of communicating with entities in the

(tags: development kernel linux proc)
Sun's Rock goes 16 cores and arrives with multi-core friends | The Register

Exclusive Sun Microsystems has promised a great deal with its futuristic "Rock" processor line but, thus far, failed to back up the promises with any technical details on the chip's design. That situation changes now that The Register has obtained exclusi

(tags: sun solaris hardware cpu rock news)
The Linux Beacon--OpenIB Alliance Expands Beyond InfiniBand Protocol to RDMA

The OpenIB project that steers the development of InfiniBand technologies, has broadened its scope and merged with the OpenRDMA project.

(tags: linux infiniband rdma ethernet)
Virtualisation: Providing Windows Applications to Users: Nine Different Theories & Architectures...

Longtime readers of my work know that I believe that IT exists for one single reason—to provide access to applications for end users. As little as ten years ago this was relatively easy. All we had to do was install the applications on the users’ comp

(tags: virtualisation windows architecture application)
Chat: Gabbly - gabbly.com...

Ajax client that can be attached to your blog to allow discussion of pages and articles.

(tags: ajax blog internet tools software javascript)
Benchmarks: Fstress NFS Benchmark...

Fstress is a synthetic, flexible, self-scaling NFS file service benchmark whose primary goal is flexibility. Fstress exports control over several dimensions in both data set and workload, enabling a wide range of tests for fundamental evaluation of file s

(tags: storage network nfs benchmark performance testing)

2006-03-14T05:28:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-13

Networking: An Introduction To IPTV...

Over the last decade, the growth of satellite service, the rise of digital cable, and the birth of HDTV have all left their mark on the television landscape. Now, a new delivery method threatens to shake things up even more powerfully. Internet Protocol T

(tags: networking ip television distributed)
News: Redefining Microprocessors - Q&A With AMD’s Henri Richard...

After a long period of being considered the under-dog of the microprocessor world, AMD emerged, particularly with its K7 generation of processors, as a company that could provide formidable competition on price-performance. AMD didn't stop there; it made

(tags: news amd cpu hardware architecture)
CLI: Monitoring Bandwidth From The Command Line...

Volker Gropp's enhanced bandwidth monitor -- called bwm-ng, or Bandwidth Monitor Next Generation -- is a rewrite of an earlier bwm. It's simple to install and use, and I recently found it to be very helpful in getting data I needed for a story. You might

(tags: cli network monitoring)
News: Peeking Into Google...

Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering, offered a rare behind-the-scenes tour of Google's architecture on Wednesday. Hoelzle spoke here at EclipseCon 2005, a conference on the open source, extensible platform fo

(tags: architecture news filesystem google hardware infrastructure)
News: Computing With Light?

The group has been investigating ways to use photons, or light particles, for information processing, rather than the electrons used in digital electronic computers today. Their work holds promise for someday developing faster, more powerful and more secu

(tags: news research hardware light cpu)
News: PetaCache - Accelerating Data-Intensive Applications...

For decades, high energy experimental physicists have struggled with a fundamental problem: they simply have too much data to analyze quickly and in its entirety.

(tags: research news cache latency storage)
Storage: Peer-to-Peer Distributed Shared Memory?

A slide deck comparing p2p with DSM nad using the two concepts to introduce a third way coined as, a data sharing serivce.

(tags: storage distributed locking peer2peer)
Storage: Ivy - A Read/Write Peer-to-Peer File System...

Ivy is a multi-user read/write peer-to-peer file system. Ivy has no centralized or dedicated components, and it provides useful integrity properties without requiring users to fully trust either the underlying peer-to-peer storage system or the other user

(tags: storage peer2peer distributed filesystem)
Storage: Highly Available DHTs - Keeping Data - Consistency After Updates...

The research in the paper is motivated by building a decentralized/P2P XML storage on top of a DHT (Distributed Hash Table). The storage must provide high data availability and support updates.

(tags: storage distributed hash peer2peer)
Architecture: On Managing Execution Environments for Utility Computing...

The main goal of utility computing is to offer computing resources on-demand. With this paradigm, applications could be dispatched to remote platforms for execution. A fundamental issue is whether the execution environments (EEs) in remote platforms...

(tags: architecture grid distributed computing management)
News: Will Intel's Core Architecture Close the Technology Gap?

technology trends and developments. This year, however, IDF was much more than an interesting summit for pros, geeks, analysts and journalists. For starters, the company's CTO Justin Rattner referred to this year's event as the most memorable IDF since it

(tags: news hardware cpu intel)
Career: Knowing When To Change Jobs...

First, contrary to what many people believe, IT career management is not the responsibility of the employer -- it is the responsibility of the individual. Good employers do acknowledge an obligation to assist their employees in building strong, rewarding

(tags: career planning recruitment)
Networks: Free Your Speech - Ekiga VOIP Client...

Ekiga is a SIP and H.323 compatible VoIP, IP Telephony, and Video Conferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with SIP or H.323 hardware and software. It supports all modern VoIP features for both SIP and H.323.

(tags: linux opensource phone tools voip gpl)
News: Transitive Gets Backing From Intel For Porting Product...

About 18 months ago, an unknown software startup called Transitive launched a product called QuickTransit, which allows operating systems and applications that were designed for one computing architecture to be run, without changes, on another architectur

(tags: intel porting virtualisation rosetta)
Development: In Pursuit Of Code Quality - Resolve to get FIT...

Whereas JUnit assumes that every aspect of testing is the domain of developers, the Framework for Integrated Tests (FIT) makes testing a collaboration between the business clients who write requirements and the developers who implement them. Does this mea

(tags: java testing development unit)
Virtualisation: IBM Virtualization Engine Platform Version 2 Technical Presentation Guide...

This IBM Redbook provides foils and technical information presented as speaker notes that describe all the existing virtualization features and products included in the IBM Virtualization Engine Version 2.

(tags: ibm virtualisation)

2006-03-13T05:26:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-12

Development: Evolutionary Database Development...

Modern software processes, also called methodologies, are all evolutionary in nature, requiring you to work both iteratively and incrementally.

(tags: development database refactoring incremental iterative)
Aspect-Oriented Programming for Production Code > Concerns and Crosscutting Concerns

Aspect-oriented programming is more than just a clever means of adding tracing to in-field code. The language has matured to a point where it can support both development-time and production-time code aspects.

(tags: aspect orientated development java)
News: IBM Breaks Speed Records With New Version Of GPFS...

Yesterday, IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the results of "Project Fastball," a performance test of the latest release (2.3) of their General Parallel File System.

(tags: cluster filesystem hardware ibm storage linux gpfs)
News: VM Rootkits - The Next Big Threat?

Lab rats at Microsoft Research and the University of Michigan have teamed up to create prototypes for virtual machine-based rootkits that significantly push the envelope for hiding malware and that can maintain control of a target operating system.

(tags: virtualisation vmm security)
Networking: OpenBGPd in OpenBSD...

I started OpenBGP two years ago, after getting completely fed up with Zebra, which we were running before. There were lots of bugs, bad configuration language, performance problems, and since I don't speak Japanese - I had problems understanding the docum

(tags: network software routing bgp)
Development: GCOV -- Tool Analysis...

In the framework of Work Package 5 - Boot-Time Optimization, of ”A Comparative Study on Real-time enhanced Linux Variants” conducted for Siemens CT SE2, Muenchen, research on existing tools to analize boot-times was performed. In this article, derived

(tags: linux gcov code analysis coverage)
Development: Kernel Function Instrumentation...

In the framework of Work Package 5 - Boot-Time Optimization, of ”A Comparative Study on Real-time enhanced Linux Variants”, research on existing tools to analyze boottimes was performed. As one of the most promising tools kernel function instrumentati

(tags: development kernel function instrumentation)
Development: Runtime Debugging In Embedded Systems...

The issue of runtime debugging in embedded systems arises with more or less any product simply because there is no such thing as bug-free code. For this reason there are two principal demands on a embedded runtime system.

(tags: embedded linux debugging runtime)
Windows: Tracking Down Managed Memory Leaks...

If you think you've got memory leaks, or if you're just wondering what kind of stuff is on your heap you can follow the very same steps that I do and get fabulous results your friends will envy. OK, well maybe not, but they're handy anyway.

(tags: debugging memory performance)
Monitoring: ZABBIX - Open Source Application & Network Monitoring Solution...

ZABBIX is software for monitoring of your applications, network and servers. ZABBIX supports both polling and trapping techniques to collect data from monitored hosts. A flexible notification mechanism allows easy and quickly configure different types of

(tags: network monitoring linux server tools)
Variable Mangling in Bash with String Operators | Linux Journal

Have you ever wanted to change the names of many files at once? Or, have you ever needed to use a default value for a variable that has no value? These and many other options are available to you when you use string operators in bash and other Bourne-deri

(tags: bash shell pattern matching regular expresssions)
A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript

Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. The last year has seen the l

(tags: development javascript tutorial)
Virtualisation: Virtual Machine - Terminal Server...

On this web site you can find some useful information and tools for the Virtual Machine and Terminal Services environment.

(tags: software vmware virt)
Nes: Intel Feeds Virtualization's Need For Speed...

With the first generation of Intel Virtualization Technology now being built into most of the chipmaker's products, Intel is turning its attention to improving its performance.

(tags: intel virtualisation performance hardware)

2006-03-10T05:29:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-09

Perl: Managing Rich Data Structures...

If you're like me, you've written plenty of scripts that use simple text files to store snippets of data. Those scripts might have evolved over time into using several snippets of data for each item, which translates into lots and lots of little text file

(tags: perl development data structures)
Interview with Valgrind Author Julian Seward

Valgrind is a CPU simulator which is used by KDE and many other projects to profile and debug our programmes. In the interview below Valgrind author Julian Seward talks to KDE Dot News about why he developed Valgrind, how you can use it and, most importan

(tags: debugging development interview valgrind)

2006-03-09T05:25:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-08

News: Intel Backs VMware, Microsoft But Xen Celebrates At IDF...

Intel snuggled up to VMware and Microsoft at its developer's forum but it's Xen that will benefit most from the company's latest batch of virtualization technology-enabled (VT) server chips, sources claim.

(tags: xen vmware virtualisation hardware)
News: The Server Strategy - Virtualisation...

IT execs who have delayed virtualising their x86-based servers for fear the technology is still unproven should put that project at the top of their to-do lists for 2006, as the market for virtualising the low-volume systems heats up.

(tags: virtualisation vmware mvs xen hardware continuity high availability)
Performance: DTrace – A New Way Of Thinking...

A fairly solid slidedeck from Robert Milkowski (http://milek.blogspot.com) that looks at Dtrace and its continuing evolution.

(tags: dtrace performance analysis statistics aggregation)
Management: CIM Concepts White Paper...

The DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) is a conceptual information model for describing computing and business entities in enterprise and Internet environments. It provides a consistent definition and structure of data, using object-oriented techniques.

(tags: cim systems management)
Management: CIM Tutorial...

Welcome to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) CIM Tutorial. This tutorial will familiarize you with the DMTF, its organization, standards and initiatives.

(tags: systems management network cim)
Management: The Growing Importance Of Management Standards...

It’s no secret that today’s organizations are being forced to do more with less. In the information technology (IT) environment, this means companies must coax ever more value out of existing systems.

(tags: systems management dmtf cim wbem)
Managemnet: CIM Technical Note...

This technical note introduces the reader to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM). This note describes the benefits of CIM and explains how to position CIM within a corporate management infrastructure.

(tags: dmtf cim wbem systems management)
Crossing borders: Exploring Active Record

The Java™ programming language has had an unprecedented run of success for vendors, customers, and the industry at large. But no programming language is a perfect fit for every job. This article launches a new series by Bruce Tate that looks at ways oth

(tags: java patterns rails ruby development)
alphaWorks : Bytecode Instrumentation Profiling Toolkit for Java : Overview

Profiling consists of getting timing traces on method execution and is commonly achieved by using a JVMPI standard interface. Instead, Bytecode Instrumentation Profiling Toolkit for Java (BIPTK) exploits new bytecode instrumentation capabilities provided

(tags: java performance profiling instrumentation)
IBM Redbooks | Patterns: SOA Client - Access Integration Solutions

The Patterns for e-business are a group of proven, reusable assets that can be used to accelerate the design and development of e-business applications. This IBM Redbook focuses on how to reuse the SOA Client - Access Integration patterns to extend enterp

(tags: soa patterns development)
Solaris: The ASF Server...

Sun gave the Apache Software Foundation a server last year, and I kept hearing, over coffee and beer, that they were running some scary-huge number of projects on it, all independently via zones; really remarkable numbers. I kept asking them to write abou

(tags: solaris apache zones virtualisation)
Virtualisation: Building A Virtual Server With Debian & OpenVZ...

In this HowTo I will describe the steps to be taken to prepare a server for OpenVZ virtual machines on Debian 3.1 (Sarge) 32Bit Linux. With OpenVZ you can create multpile Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vse

(tags: virtualisation openvz debian linux)

2006-03-08T05:22:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-07

Analysis: Space-Efficient Online Computation Of Quantile Summaries...

An approximate quantile summary of a sequence of N elements is a data structure that can answer quantile queries about the sequence to within a precision of εN . We present a new online...

(tags: analysis aggregation statistics)
Analysis: Approximate Medians & Other Quantiles In One Pass & With Limited Memory

We present new algorithms for computing approximate quantiles of large datasets in a single pass. The approximation guarantees are explicit, and apply without regard to the value distribution or the arrival distributions of the dataset. The main memory re

(tags: analysis statistics algorithms data)
Workflow: Going with the Flow...

An organization consists of two worlds. The real world contains the organization’s structure, physical goods, employees, and other organizations. The virtual world contains the organization’s computerized infrastructure, including its applications and

(tags: business workflow automation)
Howto: Setting Up A Highly Available NFS Server...

In this tutorial I will describe how to set up a highly available NFS server that can be used as storage solution for other high-availability services like, for example, a cluster of web servers that are being loadbalanced. If you have a web server cluste

(tags: network linux nfs high availability cluster storage)
HA-DR: DBRD - Network Replication For Block Devices...

DRBD is a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via (a dedicated) network. You could see it as a network raid-1.

(tags: availability cluster filesystem high kernel linux mirroring network raid storage)

2006-03-06T12:26:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-06

Development: Kademlia - A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric...

We describe a peer-to-peer distributed hash table with provable consistency and performance in a fault-prone environment. Our system routes queries and locates nodes using a novel XOR-based metric topology that simplifies the algorithm and facilitates our

(tags: distributed protocol network development hash algorithms)
Development: Complex Queries in DHT-based Peer-to-Peer Networks...

Recently a new generation of P2P systems, offering distributed hash table (DHT) functionality, have been proposed. These systems greatly improve the scalability and exact-match accuracy of P2P systems, but offer only the exact-match query facility. This p

(tags: development algorithms hash distributed)
Development: Configuring Tomcat 5 & Apache 2 With Virtual Hosts Using mod_jk...

This tutorial explains how I was able to setup a web server in order to support Java Server Pages (JSP) and Servlets using virtually hosted websites. Although this setup worked for this particular environment, I can make no guarantees that it will work fo

(tags: apache howto java server tomcat tutorial)
Performance: KcacheGrindIndex Profiler...

Callgrind uses runtime instrumentation via the Valgrind framework for its cache simulation and call-graph generation. This way, even shared libraries and dynamically opened plugins can be profiled. The data files generated by Callgrind can be loaded into

(tags: debug valgrind profiling programming tools)
Development: C++ Modularity With Namespaces & Exception Handling...

Did you know that there are three different C++ namespace types? Namespaces, which are simple to learn and apply, offer a clever means of packaging your code and can assist when symbol conflicts occur. And how well does your code handle exceptions? Insert

(tags: development c++ namespace exception)

2006-03-05T12:19:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-05

perl.com: The Evolution of Perl Email Handling

here are many modules on the CPAN for slicing and dicing email, and we're going to take a whistlestop tour of the major ones. We'll also concentrate on an effort started by myself, Richard Clamp, Simon Wistow, and others, called the Perl Email Project, to

(tags: linux perl reference programming development)
perl.com: More Advancements in Perl Programming

Around Easter last year, I finished writing the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, a task that had been four years in the making. The aim of this new edition was to reflect the way that Perl programming had changed since the first edition. Much

(tags: perl development programming)
FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace

With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program. Features include: * Simple library API * Simple installation (no need to patch or recompile the kernel) * Secure implementation * Userspace - kernel interface is v

(tags: development filesystem framework toolkit)
AnywhereUSB - Network-Enabled USB Hub - Digi International

AnywhereUSB is a network-enabled USB hub. It is the first remote networking solution to utilize RealPort® USB, Digi's patented USB Over IP® technology, making it easy to connect USB devices anywhere on a wired or wireless LAN, while eliminating the need

(tags: usb networking ip hardware)
Development: Perl Bindings For FUSE...

Set if perl bindings on CPAN that allow binding to the FUSE libraries from within Perl code. Basically allows file systems to be constructed under Linux using nothing more than Perl code and the FUSE kernel modules/libraries.

(tags: perl filesystem development kernel)
Development: Fuse::DBI - Mount Your Database As A Filesystem...

Perl module that allows you to connect to a SQL data source using DBI and then mount the datbase as a filesystem. This allows for standard filesystem tools to be applied angainst the database query. Intersting ides and a good example code for the use of

(tags: perl database development kernel filesystem)
Security: DNS Cache Snooping Whitepaper...

This research paper presents a technical overview of the technique known as DNS cache snooping. Firstly,
a brief introduction to DNS is made followed by a discussion on common misconceptions regarding DNS
sub-systems. Then this relatively unknown techni

(tags: network security privacy)
Security: Randomness For Crypto...

This page lists online resources for collecting and processing crypto-strength randomness.

(tags: math programming reference security software entropy)

2006-03-04T20:20:00.000Z

links for 2006-03-04

perl.com: The Evolution of Perl Email Handling

here are many modules on the CPAN for slicing and dicing email, and we're going to take a whistlestop tour of the major ones. We'll also concentrate on an effort started by myself, Richard Clamp, Simon Wistow, and others, called the Perl Email Project, to

(tags: linux perl reference programming development)
perl.com: More Advancements in Perl Programming

Around Easter last year, I finished writing the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, a task that had been four years in the making. The aim of this new edition was to reflect the way that Perl programming had changed since the first edition. Much

(tags: perl development programming)
FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace

With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program. Features include: * Simple library API * Simple installation (no need to patch or recompile the kernel) * Secure implementation * Userspace - kernel interface is v

(tags: development filesystem framework toolkit)

Redbooks: Simplifying Storage...

2005-12-19T07:09:00.000Z

IBM have released a new Redbook about Simplifying Storage. The abstract describes it as:

This IBM Redbook introduces Infrastructure Simplification. Infrastructure Simplification is the methodology of analyzing the complete enterprise: business processes, workflow environment end to end, and IT for simplification. This analysis yields opportunities to save you time and money and eliminate unnecessary complexity that impedes the flow of information. This IBM Redbook discusses Storage Infrastructure Simplification and demonstrates multiple ways that IBM TotalStorage and Infrastructure Simplification can help you reduce complexity, save time and money, and release the flow of information in your business.

Redbook: Migrating TO NFS Version 4...

2005-12-18T08:49:00.000Z

IBM have released a good (but lengthy) RedBook about migrating to NFS version 4. A brief introduction:

The goal of this IBM Redbook is to provide a technical planning reference for IT organizations considering an implementation of Network File System version 4 Protocol (NFSv4) on IBM AIX 5L, either as part of a new installation or as part of a migration from Andrew File System (AFS) or Distributed File Service (DFS).

This book includes sample migrations that can be used as a road map for existing installations of AFS and DFS.

Although ther is mention of AIX most of the content is fairly generic and of help for any platform.

Threading: Two Good Articles In Technology Review...

2005-12-17T21:38:00.000Z

The MIT Technology Review has two good articles covering the emergence of threads and core in processors:

Enjoy!

Debugging: Signals As A Debugging Tool...

2005-12-16T07:32:00.000Z

Good article on signals and their role in debugging. Although the articel focuses on Linux the principles are generally applicable, a summary from the article:

By focusing on the analysis of data captured using signal handlers, you can speed up the most time-consuming part of debugging: finding the bug. This article gives a background on Linux signals with examples specifically tested on PPC Linux, then goes on to show how to design your handlers to output information that lets you quickly home in on failed portions of code.

Performance: Tuning AJAX...

2005-12-16T07:16:00.000Z

XML.com is running an article about performace tuning AJAX, a good intorduction ot the subject...

Hardware: Details Emerge Of Intel's Forthcoming IO Accelerator...

2005-12-16T00:59:00.000Z

LWN are carrying an article that describes the forthcoming Intel IO acceleration architecture based on a patch that Intel has submitted to LKML...

Linux: Zones By Any Other Name...

2005-12-16T00:45:00.000Z

The OpenVZ Project has announced its first stable release which is essentially a zone like patch to Linux. After the initial announcement Andrew Morton requested a high level overview of the patch and it looked like:

On the high-level the system looks like patched Linux Kernel with a
number of user space tools. The kernel itself boots on a usual Linux distribution like RHEL4 and works as usual. But there are extensions which allow to create a new VPS context.

User space OpenVZ tools use these extensions to do the following, e.g. on VPS start:

- turn on and configure quota on VPS file system subtree.
- chroot to this filesystem tree.
- create a UBC context with configured resource limits/guarantees.
- create a VPS context and exec init in this newly created environment.
- newly spawned init executes VPS initscripts as if it was a usual Linux box which has switched power on.

Sounds very similar to zones and is a kernel namespace and resource management framework...

Hardware: Good Posting About Database Scaling On Niagara...

2005-12-16T00:34:00.000Z

Read a good post on database scaling on Niagara...

Linux: Mutual Exclusion Primitives...

2005-12-16T00:19:00.000Z

Jonathan Corbet has dropped his slidedeck from FOSS.in where he presented on mutual exclusion in the Linux kernel...

Virtualisation: VMWare Architectural Considerations Paper...

2005-12-16T00:03:00.000Z

Stumbled across this VMWare paper which looks at various architectural considerations of virtualisation - an interesting read...

Hardware: Good Post On Determining Utilisation In A CMT World....

2005-12-15T23:52:00.000Z

Found a good blog posting on determining utilisation under Niagara. The technique is generally applicable and can be used to look at the efficiency/utilisation of code on x86 platforms, will work out how to do this under Linux using oprofile if I get some spare cycles over Christmas...

Hardware: Intel Ready AMD Killer By 2008!

2005-12-13T06:31:00.000Z

The Register reports that Intel are preparing a hypertransport killer called CSI for 2008, now if only AMD will sit on their hands for two years...

Solaris: Creating x86 Boot Environments...

2005-12-13T06:21:00.000Z

Sun have released a new blueprint detailing the x86 boot process. From the introduction:

This article explains the mechanics of the boot process on the Solaris Operating System for x86 platforms so that you understand what is needed to create a customized CD/DVD. It discusses both the hard disk and CD/DVD boot processes, and points out the differences between the two.

If your involved in creating builds, etc for Solaris x86 this is a worthwhile read.

Grid: Patterns For Enterprise Grids...

2005-12-13T05:41:00.000Z

IBM have released a new RedBook entitled "Patterns For Enterprise Grids" from the introduction:

The target audience for this redbook are IT architects, consultants, software engineers with a need to use grid computing as a building block to the solution of architectural problems.

In their everyday work, those professionals need to evaluate a business problem and build a solution to solve it. They normally begin by gathering requirements related to the problem, designing a first outline of the solution and taking into consideration any special requirements that must be part of the final solution. After this step, they start the design of the actual solution, which can be comprised of one or more applications, each one requiring its own infrastructure in order to run.

Every time they can reuse the same set of solutions, devised from the experience they have acquired, the next engagement is simplified, reducing time and costs and increasing the levels of client satisfaction. Capturing, categorizing and providing access to the knowledge gained from each engagement into a repository of information can be beneficial to the overall professional community.

Patterns are great vehicles to capture components with a high degree of commonality among engagements and to express their interrelationships. Although most enterprise grid engagements are typically deployed with solutions that could be categorized as "one-of-a-kind", there is enough information gathered today to allow us to devise a set of common components among them and to derive enterprise grid patterns. The proposed patterns are based on grid solutions designed for enterprise clients over the past couple of years and are therefore representative of the current use of grid technologies in the enterprise today. They may not address all emerging grid technologies or be representative of research grids.

You can use this book as a helping guide for your grid solution design and we also expect that your experience and your feedback may be applied in the improvement of this work.

If like the rest of us, you are slowing moving towards the Grid then this is probably a worthwhile read...

Solaris: Consolidating x86 Servers Onto T1000 Servers...

2005-12-12T21:35:00.000Z

Sun have published a new blueprint covering the consolidation of x86 web servers onto T1000 servers.

Solaris: Consolidating On The T2000 Server...

2005-12-12T21:26:00.000Z

Sun has release a new blueprint covering consolidation of Sun Store onto the T2000 platform excellent paper that provides an insight into how Sun Architects moved their own applications onto the T2000 platform...

Solaris: Optimising Applications For Niagara...

2005-12-12T21:22:00.000Z

Not too surprisingly Sun has released a new blueprint about tuning for Niagara. Looks very good including how to identify candidate applications with cpustat, etc...

Linux: Interview With RedHat CTO...

2005-12-12T20:54:00.000Z

A short article featuring an interview with Brian Stevens, who is CTO at RedHat. It mainly covers their push into the virutlisation arena and the forthcoming stateless Linux, which seems ot be Linux with the configuration management information dragged from their newly released directory server...

Hardware: Q & A With AMD General Manager...

2005-12-12T19:59:00.000Z

DigiTimes.com recently had an opportunity to discuss AMD’s approach to microprocessor design with Dr. Raghuram Tupuri, general manager, Microprocessor Solutions Sector – Design Engineering, AMD...

Development: Cross Platform Threaded Memory Allocator...

2005-12-12T07:26:00.000Z

With my current focus on multi threading and its supporting technologies I came across libhoard. This library claim to outperform libumem, although there is no substantial data to back up this claim. Will look into threading benchmarks and try some benchmarks on the T2000 we are getting in at work to see if these claims hold up...

Virtualisation: Using VMWare With Oracle RAC..

2005-12-12T06:57:00.000Z

The Database Journal has a series of articles about using Oracle RAC on top of VMWare.

Part 1: Setting up VMware for Oracle/Intro to Virtualization/Server Consolidation
Part II: Oracle RAC and RAW disk setup on Windows 2003 Enterprise Server
Part III: Installing Oracle 10g Release 2 Clusterware on a 2-node Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition Server
Part IV: Installing RAC Database with ASM Option

Not sure how this would perform but it would definitely make a good test rig...

Virtualisation: Financial Services Roundup...

2005-12-12T06:19:00.000Z

There's a nice round up of the use of virtualisation in financial services companies in BTN...

Devon Releases An Update For dtrace On FreeBSD...

2005-12-12T06:12:00.000Z

Devon has posted an update on his attempts to port dtrace to FreeBSD...

Development: Using dbx To Debug MT Applications...

2005-12-12T05:29:00.000Z

There's a useful and timely blog posting on using dbx to debug multi-threaded programs, there's no excuse for not trying Sun's toolchain now that its free...

Development: Using & Hacking Subclipse...

2005-12-11T12:29:00.000Z

There's a good article on the use of Eclipse and Subversion - well worth a quick read...

Development: Good ACM Article On Threading...

2005-12-11T10:46:00.000Z

As threading seems to be flavour of the month I would recommend this article in ACM Queue. The article looks at the locking complexities that arise from preemptive scheduling of threads and introduces a stateless threading library that can be used to avoid the use of mutex structures and other complex locking primitives.

Got some ideas going about Xen, I/O spaces and simplifying the Operating System...

Pervasive Conrtributes Dtrace Probes For PostgreSQL...

2005-12-09T08:19:00.000Z

From the article:

Pervasive Software Inc., a global value leader in data infrastructure software, announced it plans to contribute source code for DTrace probes to the PostgreSQL community. DTrace probes provide a superior interface for monitoring the PostgreSQL engine and allow for more effective tuning. Pervasive also formally welcomed Sun Microsystems to the PostgreSQL community and applauded new support of PostgreSQL through the Solaris 10 Operating System.

Does dtrace Have A New Friend?

2005-12-06T21:18:00.000Z

When at the latest NC event in London today I attended a breakout session with Marc Tremblay and after all the usual questions at the end, I asked a simple one that interested me:

"You have obviously spent some time characterising workloads to understand them for your Niagra work - what tools did you use for this, were they standard Solaris tools?"

The answer contained the usual, yes we used previous generations of hardware, etc. Then suddenly the word dtrace is mentioned and I cynically expect a further plug of dtrace, however Marc mentions an extension to dtrace which is called dprofile, this allows for the studying of data structures through the software stack and into the hardware, sort of tying up the CPU counters and the dtrace profiling path - even more observability!

Had a quick scrounge around and do not see any indication of the tool anywhere...

The Sun Has Got His Hat On And He's Coming Out To Play...

2005-12-06T18:13:00.000Z

Have just got back from the Network Computing Presentation in London. First wow, its great to see Sun back in the game, big time. I had the pleasure of watching Jonathan Schwartz extols a social vision for Sun (someone's been reading "The Dream Society" from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies) where Sun will not only excel technically but will save the planet in the process - yes it was hyped but there was a lot of smart stuff in there that made both business sense and means we might have a planet left in ten years.

A few sections to highlight the content for you:

The Big One
Sun will Open Source the RPL from Niagara - welcome to the world of Open Source hardware. This is a smart move and allowed Jonathan to paint the dream that Africa will hire a fab and produce SPARC chips for local consumption and local growth. The business vision is the smaller chunk of the larger pie story and in terms of competitive advantage - RedHat have no hardware to Open Source and who cares if Microsoft Open Source their mice!

Core Wars
The center piece was the T2000 server featuring Niagara. Wow - the price points are down because Sun can now sell chips that have two failed cores as a 6 core Niagara allowing them to keep almost everything the produce for retail - no more expensive SPARC chips, they just beat the volume price point advantage with the usable volume price point advantage.

So that's the start, Niagara has been carefully architected as the first generation of chips that start to share components, in the olden days we called this SOC (system on a chip), the 8 cores share an FPU, great for most workloads, crap for Monte Carlo simulations (but most people run mainstream workloads - I only know what one is because I work at an Investment Bank).

The movement of the memory controllers on board, the memory access latency and the number of threads have all been architected for the most prevalent workloads, loosely called "the Internet" by Sun but the deep dive with Marc Tremblay that I attended seemed to stack up and "throughput computing" became the natural bed-fellow of "the network is the computer".

Other interesting features are the Java offloading and the crypto offloading - both cool. The driver was heat and power though - 7.5Kw give you 960 threads in a rack, so you should be able to chop down the number of racks somewhat, as the throughput paradigm should keep them busy.

We Are A Phone Company
Someone loves the mobile phone industry and Sun are moving to the same charging models. Having "given everything away" they now must transition to a service model. The T1000/T2000 will be the first servers that cost less if you buy a service contract, you know like that mobile phone you own. Its actually 'free' if you buy it with a contract but its $400 if you don't. Well servers are capex and one-off costs, if Sun can gain annual service contracts on the back of free hardware then that's their model, if you want a server without a service contract then you can pay for it. Interesting approach, will be very interesting to see how it effects those companies such as RedHat and Microsoft that have no hardware to give you...

Conclusions
Aagh it was like the Sun we used to know and love - welcome back - we missed you. I sat with a member of my account staff and he said to me "we did this too late...", I corrected him and proposed he should have said "we should have done this earlier...", if I have any kind of negatives from what I saw, that would be the sum of it, not the worse criticism ever.

Nice Solaris Article on NewsForge...

2005-12-06T06:47:00.000Z

NewsForge is running a nice piece on the OpenSolaris distributions and community. Worth a read, one of the more positive articles I have read in this area...

Xensource Announce The Availability Of Xen 3.0...

2005-12-06T06:12:00.000Z

In a detailed press release Xensource have announced the release of Xen 3.0 which has the following features:

* 32-way SMP vServers
* Hot plug CPU's
* Dynamic Relocation of vServers
* Support for PAE in 32-bit vServers
* Support for 1TB of memory in vServers
* Support for Trusted Platform Modules
* Support for x86, x86-64, IA-64 & PowerPC

The next stage in the evolution of Xen is testing, hardening and performance tuning of the core, according to one of Xen's founders.

Comments On Moore's Law & The Future Of Processors...

2005-12-05T06:33:00.000Z

Greg Papadopoulos' recent blog entry discusses the misrepresentation of Moore's law and how it will continue in the future. He basically rings in the end of microprocessors (and other discreet components) and predicts that the future will involve microsystems - sounds good and makes an excellent read...

Hardware: Intel's Roadmap Revealed...

2005-12-04T09:28:00.000Z

Tom's Hardware has an article about Intel's rumoured roadmap. Its a reasonable read and it obvious that the increased competition from AMD has refocused Intel. A summary from the article:

Intel was surprisingly talkative when it came to future technologies and products this year. As a result, most of the technical audience is up to date regarding the upcoming micro architecture based on the 65 nm Merom design. We discovered that all of these announcements are the top of a hot iceberg only, because the chip firm intends to deliver almost 20 new processor designs within the next eight quarters; all for the sole purpose of dominating the desktop, mobile and enterprise segments.

Life must be tough for Intel currently, in the "Big Iron" chip market the Itanium is starting to look completely irrelevant compared to the SPARC offerings from Sun. Its interesting to compare the content of the Intel article, which seems to be about correcting a flawed vision, with this article from Sun which seems to be more concerned with continued vision rather than corrected, from the article:

"In the meantime, what I keep telling people is: To truly exploit the value of multicore and multithread, you have to start from scratch. That means a brand new core, a brand new pipeline, and that takes easily four years," Tremblay adds.
"So, fortunately, we started four years ago, through a variety of projects, and we'll see the fruits of that for the next several years, while you're not going to see anything new from the competition until probably the 45-nanometer generation, which is probably another two years away. That gives us a huge window of opportunity."

Anyway that's a quick round-up on chips for now. I have been quite quiet lately, due to a new project I have been working on which is connected (sort of) to this space, so I will be back soon with the results of my research into this new area.

Performance: PHP Performance Profiling...

2005-11-29T05:51:00.000Z

The Linux Journal is running an article about PHP performance profiling. The main technique outlined shows how to identify hotspots in your code and is similar to the techniques you would use to tune any other body of code. Whilst its a nive intorductory articel on the topic it owuld have been nice to see some reference to the dtrace probe points that have been added to PHP.

This does start to touch on some personal thoughts I have been having recently about defining a standard API for inserting probe points into various dynamic languages, enabling authors of such programs to expose interesting profiling information on both dtrace and systemtap (assuming systemtap delivers user space probing), in fact this could just be a general profiling API for all Developers, something a bit like ARM. Anyway some research and serious thought is probably required on my part before I say too much more.

Linux: Tuning Oracle Database 10g For ext3 File Systems...

2005-11-29T05:19:00.000Z

RedHat Magazine has an article this month on the improved performance of ext3 with Oracle 10g when using DIO/AIO under RHEL4 U2. A reasonable article but for me could have done with a little more meat and substance, as to the exact changes that were made in the code and why they caused this improvement, time to consult the changelogs and the code I guess.

Analysis: Queueing Theory Resources...

2005-11-28T06:52:00.000Z

After watching Sun's recent scalability Webcast in which Bryan Cantrill pointed out that the best method for studying the vertical scalability of systems was to develop a mathematical model. I thought it might be time to trawl the web and see what Queueing Theory resources are out there. So here are a few links for those of you who are interested:

Free Books
Introduction To Queueing Theory
Queueing Theory
A Short Introduction To Queueing Theory
The Practical Performance Analyst

Of these, I can personally recommend the Practical Performance Analyst by Neil Gunther. In the 'free' version of the book he mainly uses the C based PDQ Toolkit, however if you buy the later book Neil has ported PDQ to Perl (its now on CPAN) and details how to use it - I would personally recommend buying the second book.

Related Papers & Articles
Computer Simulation Techniques: The Definitive Introduction!
A General Introduction To Queueing Theory
Queuing Analysis (A Practical Guide for Computer Scientists)
Queueing for Dummies

Any time spent studying this field is likely to pay dividends, particularly as software scaling is likely to be the hot topic of the next few years, as chips move to multicore.

Linux: Introduction To Netcat...

2005-11-27T23:14:00.000Z

Linux.com has a brief introduction to the GNU Netcat tool which is one of the most usefull adhoc network tools available...

Linux: New Approaches To Package Management...

2005-11-27T23:03:00.000Z

Linux.com has this article which explores alternatives to RPM in the Linux world. The article briefly introduces Portage and Conary in particular...

Linux: Shared Subtress...

2005-11-26T17:46:00.000Z

LWN is carrying the technical documentation from the new shared subtrees patch for the Linux kernel. This feature allows for relationships between the kernel filesystem namespaces to be created. Although the accompanying article indicates that the motivator for this functionality is the ReiserFS files as directories feature (i.e. hard links for directories) and the new filesystems in user space feature, it does not take much imagination to see this as start at implementing zone-like functionality in Linux...

Sparc: Throughput Computing Paper...

2005-11-26T17:33:00.000Z

There is an interesting introductory article to CMT & CMP from Sun. Covers the recent advances in the Sparc chipset, introducing the coolthreads technology and the Sparc T1/IV+ chip. From the introduction:

Sun's Throughput Computing initiative is designed to specifically address these seemingly contradictory trends providing radically better levels of application and computational throughput while fundamentally changing the equation on space and power consumption. Chip multiprocessing and Sun's radical chip multithreading (CMT) processors with CoolThreads technology allow individual systems to deliver significantly more throughput in footprints that are the same or considerably less than previous generation systems enabling truly massive levels of simplification and consolidation. Simpler, cooler, and more efficient chip and system designs also dramatically lower both power and cooling bills, prolonging the useful life of many data centers while lowering dependence on shared energy resources. Efficient power and cooling is critical, as a recent survey indicated that data center managers report a 10 percent or more increase in power requirements over the past year and fully 41 percent reported that they anticipated upgrading their power and cooling systems over the next three years.

Article: Comparing Two High Performance...

2005-11-26T15:01:00.000Z

Artima have published this article on high performance socket I/O which discusses how-to re-engineer the standard non-asynchronous sockets approach found in most UNIX systems to more closely resemble the asynchronous sockets provided in Windows...

Scale My Apps: Strategies and Technologies for Maximum Scalability...

2005-11-26T07:55:00.000Z

Sun have put together a very good webcast which highlights how they are transitioning their expertise in large NUMA type systems into the challenges of smaller horizontally scaled technologies.

Obviously one of the main thrusts of this webcast is threading, although it was refreshing to hear the chat to be fairly platform agnostic with discussion of both horizontal and vertical approaches being discussed.

One of the things that came across to me in this presentation is that really they are facing the same challenges in the vertical and horizontal environments, its just when you solve them for the horizontal you have to operate in a smaller solution domain and be more creative, as you cannot offload these complex issues to the system hardware.

Clarification: Adam To Attend LOSUG...

2005-11-26T07:45:00.000Z

Adam Leventhal will be attending the LOSUG meeting. My cynical fears that the phrase "aided by" meant dialed in have been allayed by Adam who confirmed he will be attending - see you there (and free Solaris/ free beer - it just keeps getting better)!

Adam Leventhal Makes An Appearance On LUG Radio...

2005-11-25T05:55:00.000Z

Adam Levanthal is interviewed in the the latest edition of LUG radio. Please be aware that LUG Radio contains quite a lot of swearing and sexual references between interviews, so you are probably not best to play it in the middle of the Office at full volume. Quite a tough interview with the guys asking some fairly direct questions...

LWN: Nexenta & Debian Collide...

2005-11-24T07:17:00.000Z

Not too surprisingly, the new darling of the OpenSolaris world, Nexenta has re-ignited the license debate and questioning of the motivation for Sun's choice of license. I am no legal expert so I will not comment on that aspect but I do agree with the following sentiment expressed in the article:

I'm amazed at the level of intolerance that's greeting a pretty major contribution to the free software community. There are, what, five major OS/kernels for PCs/workstations these days -- Windows, OS X, Solaris, BSD and Linux. How does it make any sense at all to be hostile to the fact that now four out of those five are free at their core?

Seems to me that this something that needs to be worked out so that the whole FOSS movement can move forward. Maybe I should learn more about the legalities of licensing before I dig too big a hole for myself - its an interesting read...

Trouble At The Top At Novell...

2005-11-24T06:04:00.000Z

Stumbled across an interesting article in Business Week when I was trying to make sense of what has been happening at Novell recently. Not sure about which of the executives is correct but I cannot help agree with the sentiment that I would rather see two major Linux players than one. It perhaps would have been nice to see a mention of Sun and OpenSolaris in the article, perhaps if Novell manage to drop the SuSE ball then OpenSolaris will be the born successor and that we might start to think more in terms of a FOSS market than a Linux one, it would certainly cheer up Eric...

Minix 3 Released...

2005-11-24T05:27:00.000Z

Version 3 of the famous Minix Operating system, has been released. The core kernel is under 4000 lines of code and it follows a micro kernel approach. There is also an updated version of the classic Tannenbaum book slated, to go with the code. Possibly a useful teaching aid and potentially a real-time O/S?

London OpenSolaris Meeting...

2005-11-23T06:23:00.000Z

Another LOSUG meeting has been announced. It will be at the same venue as last time:

Sun Customer Briefing Centre,
45 King William Street,
London EC4R 9AD.

(A Map Courtesy Of Google)

The rough agenda is:

- General - What's new in OpenSolaris
- Technical - "Deeper with DTrace"
- OpenDiscussion(tm?)- Q & A session

The "Deeper With Dtrace" session is 'aided by Adam Leventhal' which I am not sure exactly what that means but he may be involved in some way.

See some of you there - Monday 19th December 2005?

Set Of Solaris Networking Summary Slides...

2005-11-22T20:29:00.000Z

When trawling the web as part of my research into an difference that I have been seeing between the Linux and Solaris TCP implementations I stumbled across this slide deck which provides a decent summary of the current and future state of the Solaris network stack - it was also exceptionally gratifying (as someone who defected to Linux from Solaris a number of years ago), to be able to browse the source and read the code in use in Solaris 10 and it so neat (deliberately ambiguous)!

New Linux Distributed Debugger...

2005-11-22T20:10:00.000Z

Stumbled across a new and interesting project on sourceware.org called frysk. Seems like an amalgam of a monitoring system and a debugging framework. Read through the FAQ, looked at the screenshots and signed up to the mailing list. Will try to find some time to see how far the tool has come and if its as useful as it appears, will post updates when appropriate...

Emerging Compiler Transfoms...

2005-11-22T06:51:00.000Z

This excellent paper looks at the state of modern compiler transformations, reviews the state of the art ideas in this area and then researches some of the apsects of gcc 4.x...

Intel Roadmap Analysis...

2005-11-22T06:16:00.000Z

As the news trickles in that Dell are to start to sell AMD across their entire product line, its interesting to read this analysis at Tom's hardware of Intel's Product Roadmap. The analysis is mainly based around the server platforms that will be delivered in 2006 and the additional value-plays that Intel will make in this area, such as increased RAS and I/O acceleration.

Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small is Beautiful...

2005-11-21T20:39:00.000Z

An excellent article on using Ruby to build a workload/Grid management system by Ara Howard:

Ruby Queue software package lowers the barriers scientists need to overcome in order to realize the power of Linux clusters. It provides an extremely simple, economic, and easy-to-understand tool that harnesses the power of many CPUs while simultaneously allowing researchers to shift their focus away from the mundane details of complicated distributed computing systems and back to the task of actually doing science. The tool set is designed with a K.I.S.S, research-focused, philosophy that enables any ordinary (non-root) user to set up a zero-admin Linux cluster in 10 minutes or less. It is currently being used successfully in such diverse fields as bio-chemical research at the University of Toronto, geo-mechanical modeling at IGEOSS, and studying the nighttime lights of the world at the National Geophysical Data Center.

Tying Together Power, CMP & Performance...

2005-11-21T20:21:00.000Z

Yet another top article in ACM queue, as part of their series on CMP. This article is from Luiz Andre Barroso, who heads up the Platform Engineering Group at Google. The article goes through some of the economics of CMP adoption and it quite a timely read if you have been seeing the "DataCenter In A Box" and Niagra speculation of late...

Living With CMT, CMP & SMP...

2005-11-21T06:21:00.000Z

Richard McDougall has this excellent article published in the ACM Queue covering "Extreme Software Scaling". The years of experience that the Sun performance guys have spent scaling software onto their massive top-end systems is going to become the norm as these techniques hit the mainstream with CMT (Chip Multi Threading), CMP (Chip Multi Processing) & SMP (symmetric Multi Processing)...

Measuring CPU...

2005-11-21T06:15:00.000Z

There's a very good post in Adrian Cockcroft's blog discussing the construction and relevance of CPU utilisation figures and the impact of hyperthreading on them...

SATA Disk Review...

2005-11-21T05:57:00.000Z

Fourteen offerings from the fast evolving SATA world are covered in this guide from Tom's hardware. Also serves as a useful refernce for constructing your own disk benchmarks...

Updating Delicious...

2005-11-20T11:58:00.000Z

After my absence I am updating my delicious links. New articles include (much of my research work is posted to delicious which is available as an RSS feed or as a list on the sidebar of this page):

Architecture: End to End Arguments in System Design...
This paper presents a design principle that helps guide placement of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system. This principle, called the end-to-end argument, suggests that functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant o
to systems...

Virtualisation: Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment...
While consolidating physical to virtual machines using Xen,we want to be able to deploy and manage virtual machines in the same way we manage and deploy physical machines. For operators and support people there should be no difference between virtual and to...

Development: Cocoa Subclasses & Delegates...
In Java subclassing, nearly everything was quite common. So common in fact, that Sun provided generic subclasses in quite a few cases. Objective-C and Cocoa, however, have a different approach. Marcus walks you through the different approaches used in...

Shell: Reading Function & Cursor Keys In A Shell Script...
This month, Chris F.A. Johnson presents Reading Function and Cursor Keys in a Shell Script...

Databases: Learning from The Web...
The Web has much to teach us about managing and modeling distributed data. It's time we began listening.

Databases: Why Your Data Won't Mix...
Making heterogeneous schemas play nicely together has challenged computer scientists for years, but we're on the path to better behavior...

Databases: Managing Semi-Structured Data...
Most of the world's data does not fit into a traditional database structure. Fortunately, work is being done on various fronts to harness this vast information pool...

Development: Pragmatic Exceptions...
A general rule for showing obvious exception messages (such as in a dialog) should be. Show the message only if there is an immediate, reasonable course of action users can take...

Development: Memory Management & Embedded Databases...
Building an infrastructure with opimisation in mind...

Development: Wide-Character Format String Vulnerabilities
Strategies for handling format string weaknesses...

Linux: The SIG11 Problem (Hardware Debugging)...
This FAQ describes what the possible causes are for an effect that bothers lots of people lately. Namely that a linux(*)-kernel (or any other large package for that matter) compile crashes with a "signal 11". The cause can be software or (most likely)...

Virtualisation: Building your own VMWare VMM Management Websites...
SDK Programming - building your own Virtual Machine Management Websites...

Virtualisation: ESX Server Performance Tuning Lab...
VMware ESX Server Performance Troubleshooting...

Embedded: SoC, Function allocation and specification...
The system-on-a-chip (SoC) has emerged as the ideal replacement for multipart chipsets. The SoC design promises a single-chip solution, lower power, less board real estate, simpler integration, and lower part counts -- all of which are clearly quite attra...

Systems Management: The Role Of The Human In Autonomic Systems...
Autonomic computing enables IT systems to manage themselves. The autonomic computing architecture provides a foundation on which self-managing information technology systems can be built...

Grid: Grid architecture in the Telescience Project...
What does it mean to "grid-enable" an end-to-end process? In the first article of this series, we describe the grid-based system architecture developed in the Telescience Project at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research.
to grid virtualisation architecture...

Virtualisation: Windows Virtualisation Technology for Intel Architecture...
The first presentation covers with greater detail what appeared on the public virtualization roadmap webcast, while the remaining two disclose information never appeared till now. So it really worth the read...

Virtualisation: Windows Virtualization Technology for AMD Architecture
The first presentation covers with greater detail what appeared on the public virtualization roadmap webcast, while the remaining two disclose information never appeared till now. So it really worth the read...

Virtualisation: Windows Virtualisation Architecture...
The first presentation covers with greater detail what appeared on the public virtualization roadmap webcast, while the remaining two disclose information never appeared till now. So its really worth the read...

Virtualisation: Architectural Considerations & Other Evaluation Criteria...
A new white paper, Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria, describes the operation of virtualization designs and examines the issues...

Virtualisation: Slicing & Dicing Servers...
Part of an emerging family of containment technologies, server virtualization is designed to help reduce server sprawl Â the proliferation of individual hardware servers and accompanying management and resource allocation problems...

Performance: Extreme Software Scaling...
Chip multiprocessors have introduced a new dimension in scaling for application developers, operating system designers, and deployment specialists.
to cmt software performance tuning...

Research: TinyDisk...
TinyDisk is a program from saving and retrieving files from TinyURL and TinyURL-like services such as Nanourl. It overlays a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent and globally shared filesystem...

Storage: Serial ATA Trade Body...
Home page for the SATA-IO trade organisation...

Virtualisation: Developing, Testing & Deploying...
This article shows how VMware software improves testing productivity and eliminates hardware bottlenecks for testing and deployment...

Thanks Zen...

2005-11-20T11:04:00.000Z

After a number of weeks off the Net I am now hooked up with a new service provides, called Zen Internet. So far they seem excellent and extremely competent, had to phone technical support and got through in less than a minute - what a joy...

Catching up on my email and RSS - will be back blogging soon...

Still Being DOS'd By UK Online...

2005-11-07T09:08:00.000Z

Its now been nearly six seeks since I made the mistake of moving to UK Online. I have now been waiting 2 weeks for them to terminate their service so I can order a new service - latest update they messed it up and I will be lucky if I can order another service by mid-November. Thanks UK Online (a wholly owned subsidiary of Easynet for those of you interested)...

Thanks To UK Online...

2005-10-22T18:18:00.000+01:00

I decided to try to save some money by switching Broadband provider. Unfortunately it has not gone well and I have now been without an Internet connection at home for two weeks. I am expecting it to be several more weeks before I am back online again.

Normal service will be resumed at this time!

Article: The Future Of Microprocessors...

2005-09-28T03:44:00.000+01:00

There is yet another excellent article in ACM Queue outlining the past, current and future state of processors. One of the co-authors of the article is Kunle Olukton who founded Afara Websystems which was purchased by Sun Microsystems. The technology developed by Afara prior to the purchase was later to become Niagra and the article focuses closely on CMP (Chip Multi Processing) as well as SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading).

The article covers the triad of modern chip design clock frequency, superscalar instruction issue and multi-threading, revealing the delicate trade-offs that are now in place and likely future directions now that two of the three avenues have been fully exploited. The article covers the background of Intel, AMD and Sun's current processor design direction and if you play close attention there might be a taste of what is in the forthcoming Rock CMP/SMT play from Sun Microsystems.

All-in-all a recommended read!

Hyperthreading Webcast ...

2005-09-27T22:31:00.000+01:00

On September 28, 2005, the HyperTransport Consortium will
conduct a live web cast and will compare and contrast traditional
serial and parallel bus characteristics and illustrate how blended
architectures can combine the best of both to deliver a balance of
features and capabilities for their intended applications.
Register today for the online event that will help boost your
general knowledge of bus interconnects:

Register

Reconfigurable Computing On OpenFPGA...

2005-09-27T06:00:00.000+01:00

Recently I have been researching Reconfigurable Computing centering around the use of FPGAs. With the break down of Moore's Law due to cost ("High clock rate is a cost, not a benefit; it drives up costs of everything else in the machine"), as well as heat and power, the use of FPGA has become more attractive.

It seems in the modern technology landscape that when a technology matures and start to go mainstream someone adds the moniker "Open", so in true to this, I have been looking at the OpenFPGA site. The most useful section on the site is the presentations section which contains much useful information.

Current FPGA plays include:

- SGI's RASC
- Cray's Application Acceleration System

It will also be interesting to see if IBM's Cell Processor becomes a Reconfigurable Computing play - their coming Linux support with spuFS hints at this, particularly with the bladeCenter based prototype system.

Linux: Gartner VP Announces Death Of UNIX...

2005-09-26T07:07:00.000+01:00

Gartner VP, Donald Feinberg has announced the death of UNIX at a recent conference in India. Not sure if Apple or Sun agree with this statement, both of whom have recently claimed to have the world's most advanced Operating System with their respective OS/X and Solaris products. I for one had been quite enthused by the emergence of OS/X and the re-emergence of Solaris, feeling they were likely to drive innovation in the diverse Desktop and Server markets giving Linux a run for its money...

Grid: Good Article In ACM Queue...

2005-09-25T09:04:00.000+01:00

There is a great grid article in ACM Queue by Paul Strong of Sun Microsystems. This is a great read and I love the diagram at the bottom of page four which provides a wonderful overview of where all the various elements of the data centre technology stack sit.

OpenSolaris: IP Tunneling Design Document Release...

2005-09-19T07:22:00.000+01:00

Following the release of the IPMP design document last week the Clearview Team have released their design document for IP Tunneling.

Netcat Added To My Tools Page...

2005-09-17T09:38:00.000+01:00

Added Netcat to the tools page of my website. Netcat is often described as the 'Swiss army penknife' of networking tools - its very useful for network debugging and testing. The description on my site is as follows:

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

VMWare Releases New Version Of ESX Server...

2005-09-17T02:38:00.000+01:00

VMWare has quietly released a new version of ESX server, the release notes indicate that its just an update release that supports more software and hardware. A quick look at the supported Operating Systems rather disappointingly reveals that ESX server still does not officially support Solaris surely there must be more demand for this than FreeBSD and Novell Netware (No offence intended to advocates of these Operating Systems but Solaris is more common in most Enterprises)...

Web Services For Machine Management...

2005-09-17T01:31:00.000+01:00

There's an interesting article in ACM Queue about WSDM-MUWS and the prevailing standards for the management of hosts using Web Services and how this shapes up against traditional management technologies, such as SNMP. Quite interesting, one aspect that is not covered is the potential for integration of various existing management technologies using ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) technologies.

This is an area that I have considered for some time now where I can imagine applications registering callbacks with disparate alerting services. This would mean rather than paging support staff in the middle of the night because an application was running low on disk space that the application could raise an internal PO to the ERP system, have its budget checked, receive an authorisation token to present to the Storage System that would then provision the required space and finally acknowledge the alert.

Once systems management begins to integrate with current application architecture the automation opportunities are huge. Anyway enough dreaming, back to reality and manual provisioning, read the article its worth the effort.

PDQ Added To My Tools Page...

2005-09-17T01:15:00.000+01:00

Added PDQ to the tools page of my website. PDQ is covered in Neil Gunther's book "The Practical Performance Analyst", which is an excellent text covering Erlang's concept of queuing theory and its practical uses in capacity planning and performance tuning. The description on my site is as follows:

PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) is a queuing model solver, not a simulator. The queuing theory models discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 of The Practical Performance Analyst are incorporated into the solution methods used by PDQ. This saves you the labour of implementing this code each times you construct a queuing model and allows you to concentrate on the accuracy of your model rather than the accuracy of the solutions.

Sorry For The Confusion...

2005-09-17T00:07:00.000+01:00

There seems to have been some recent confusion that my comment announcing the availability of a patch against the 2.6.13 kernel, constituted a production endorsement of Systemtap. In case anyone else is not familiar with how the Linux Development process works, here goes:

- a patch is generated against the most recently released mainline kernel from Linus's tree, such as the one I cited above.
- this is sent to the mailing lists for the areas of interest associated with the patch, such as the Systemtap lists in this case.
- the patch is peer reviewed by the members of that group, which happened in this case and a number of issues where uncovered.
- the patch is the given wider distribution on LKML where is reviewed by a much larger group of peers.
- after this process is complete, if there is a general appetite, the patch is submitted to Andrew Morton and enters his -mm tree.
- once Andrew has the patch merged and is happy that is should enter the mainline, it enters Linus's tree, where it will go through maybe upto four release candidates as the release stabilises and is tested by a much wider group of people.
- Once the patch is in Linus's tree it may then be selected for inclusion into vendor kernels, or perhaps backported into earlier kernels by the various vendors depending on its value to them.

Obviously, as the post I made pointed people to what was clearly an initial patch release and a request for comments, I assumed I did not need to point out that this was not 'production ready', after all I have recently pointed out in my blog that Systemtap is in early development.

Hope this clear things up - please feel free to post comments if you have any particular questions.

Project R Added To Tools...

2005-09-16T07:18:00.000+01:00

Started a new section in the tools section of my website called data tools and added the R Project with the following descritption:

This project produces a statistical graphing language, that can be used to plot graphs. The tool provides a number of statistical methods such as linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification and clustering, as well as graphical methods.

Systemtap Article In Redhat Magazine...

2005-09-16T06:34:00.000+01:00

Will Cohen has written a Systemtap article for Redhat Magazine. The article describes how to get Systemtap running on FC4 and then goes through some scripts - a worthwhile read.