Solaris & Xeon Break Million Messages Per Second

Sun Microsystems today announced that it has collaborated with Intel to not only provide the best throughput performance to date by breaking the million-messages-per second barrier, but also the lowest available network latency on a 1Gb Ethernet. This performance output was generated on a new financial services benchmark known as Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS).

The Intel-based Sun Fire™ X4150 with Solaris 10 provided the top-notch results for the benchmark and it indeed is superlative performance to reach million-messages per second. And more importantly its done on standard network topology instead of stacked topology, which can improve scalability but comes at a cost. Doing it with standard 1Gb Ethernet is surely an achievement. The performance by the system is highly dependent on the hardware which Intel has engineered and Sun has built. But Solaris also has contributed to the improved performance. Solaris has the least latency in message passing and network performance on it is excellent.

Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz applauded the new benchmark results and attributed much of it to Solaris. And he sure must be happy!! Sun Microsystems is very focused on Solaris/OpenSolaris these days with a lot of development work towards OpenSolaris. There is also a big PR machine running for openSolaris these days and some ol’ Netbeans guys have been moved to talk and explore the world on openSolaris. Sun Microsystems has got this target to make openSolaris big on the desktop with a distro-plan similar to Linux distros.

Congratulations to Sun on the new benchmark record!! It is definitely one of the strong forte for Sun to perform on the network, but the desktop move is a totally different ball-game. And why didn’t we have one of those largest hardware/microprocessor team from Sun make the system from UltraSPARC to perform that good instead of the Intel hardware ??

Acrobat Reader Being Developed for Solaris x86

If you have downloaded the latest Solaris x86 (2008.05), and tried to download the Acrobat Reader, then you are like me and haven't found a version for your newly installed OS. Adobe today announced that it is developing a version of Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86. But Adobe says that it'll be released only in 2009 and not this year.

The announcement reads:

This was, of course, not a straightforward decision - there are lots of dependencies that we need to deal with, including third-party dependencies, platform limitations, internal and external dependencies and resource constraints. These constraints are not always apparent but have to be dealt with when a huge product like the Reader needs to be ported to a new platform.

The announcement has two sad things for me. It is going to take too long to release and why hasn't Adobe already started working on it. PDF is like the standard for document sharing and it is widely used. Solaris is also a big platform, although the x86 move is a pretty new one. Adobe already has a version of Acrobat Reader for the Solaris SPARC platform. So it seems odd that making the dependencies is going to take so much time!!