Oracle releases 11G today!

Oracle Corp. released the new version of its database software, adding security features and support for multimedia files to its biggest-selling and most-profitable product.

The program, called 11g, is being introduced at an event today in New York. The new version lets customers track changes made to databases and encrypt data, Redwood City, California- based Oracle said today in a PR Newswire statement.

Oracle makes about two-thirds of its software sales from databases and related programs, and is counting on the new features to encourage clients to upgrade. In a survey of 400 customers, the Independent Oracle Users Group found that 35 percent plan to buy the new software within a year.

``It's usually an 18-month cycle for people to upgrade,'' Ari Kaplan, president of the Chicago-based customer group, said in an interview. ``Most people expect a solid release, and don't see a reason to wait.''

Shares of Oracle, the world's third-largest software maker, rose 11 cents to $19.83 at 9:36 a.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They had advanced 15 percent this year before today.

The price of the database software is based on the number of processor chips used to run the program. Oracle often offers discounts of 20 percent to 80 percent, depending on the customer, said Donald Feinberg, an analyst with Gartner Inc. in Sao Paulo.

Oracle sells its software primarily for computers running the Unix and Linux operating systems. The company last year had 47.1 percent of the $15.2 billion worldwide database market, compared with 21.2 percent for International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s 17.4 percent, according to Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rochelle Garner at rgarner4@bloomberg.net

Tags: oracle, oracle 11g

Eben Moglen Scottish society for Computers and Law annual lecture for 2007.

The lecture, talk or discussion given by Eben Moglen on June 26th to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law, "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" is available for reading or listening.
I think it is good for any one who is interested in Open Source to read or listen. I enjoyed reading it.
Here is the link to Eben Moglen's talk.

Tags: Eben Moglen, GPLV3

Google Desktop now runs on Linux!

After getting used to the Google Desktop on my MAC, I sometime wished that I had it for my Linux machines. I use Linux, mainly at my work and home and it seems now I can try Google Desktop out.
According to Official Google Blog post;
Official Google Blog: Google Desktop now available for Linux posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.
So if it is what you like, you can get Google Desktop for Linux at GDL site.

Tags: Google, Google Desktop, Linux, Google Desktop for Linux

64GB Flash SSD from SAMSUNG

Samsung has announced 64GB Flash SSD(Nand Flash-based Solid State Drive) to be used in notebooks and sub notebooks.
The drive it self is available in 2.5" and 1.8" sizes with 40 pin ATA interface and 50 pin interfaces respectively.
I think it is a boon to mobile users as power consumption drops dramatically with these drives. So does the noise generated by the normal hard drives. But why ATA, most notebooks nowadays come with SATA interfaces and perhaps may be even could be used as boot drive for servers. May be could give a boost to write ahead and binary logs, and for swap drives!

Here are the specifications according to Samsung site.

Unlimited Resistance against Impact : Over 1500G No mechanical parts Extended Operation Temperature Range From -25°C to 85°C The lightest Storage Solution in the world Fast Access Time and Read/Write Speed Sequential Read Sector : Up to 58MB Sustained Write Sector : Up to 32MB <1ms src="http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/FlashSSD/images/Bult_org.gif" alt="" border="0" height="3" vspace="2" width="8">Fast Access Time and Read/Write Speed Under 1msec, No Seek time Built-in EDC and ECC function to correct 2 random bits for each 512 Bytes Virtually no heat generation No accoustic noise or vibration PIO 0~4 mode. Up to ATA5 and UDMA mode 4 (Ultra DMA66)

NASA releases CLARAty Robotic Software under Open Source License

Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy or otherwise known as CLARAty is a collection of that spans over 100K lines of code. And this is on version 0.10. By looking at the capabilities and the scope it covers, this will certainly will grow larger by the time it reaches version 1.0!

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program's rover technology developments.

The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov. Also extensive information as how to download, compile and additional tools needed are available here.

Tags: NASA, Robotics, JPL, MARS Technology, Open source robotics, CLARAty

The TeraGrid '07 conference,

The TeraGrid '07 conference theme is "Broadening Participation in TeraGrid." is open to scientists, engineers, faculty, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students, high school teachers, representatives from federal agencies, grid computing industry representatives, and staff from TeraGrid resource providers and partners, in short anyone who is interested in high performance computing.

Register by May 5 to receive a reduced conference rate. Online registration will remain open after May 5, and on-site registration will be offered for walk-ins. Follow the links below to register and discover Teragrid

TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation. TeraGrid combines leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. TeraGrid provides more than 150 teraflops of computing power and nearly 2 petabytes of rotating storage, numerous scientific data collections, specialized data analysis tools, scientific gateways and user portals to simplify access to valuable resources, and visualization resources all interconnected via a high-speed gigabits/second dedicated national network.

Links;
The TeraGrid '07 conference registration;
The TeraGrid '07 conference

Tags: grid, Teragrid, high performance computing, HPC

Backup and recover MySQL with Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

I know a lot of people who uses MySQL for their Grid projects and other projects. I use MySQL extensively on Linux and other platforms. It is not only for experimental projects. I use MySQL in production as well.
For many years, I have tried many a backup solutions but recently came across Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL and now I am a happy camper. I can backup all my servers, both local and remote.
Here is some information about this great application;
The latest release of ZRM for MySQL includes enhancements designed to improve support for remote MySQL servers, fine-tune ZRM for optimal backup, and deliver more flexible reporting. New features include:

* Support for incremental backup for remote MySQL servers to reduce the load on MySQL server and network during backup.
* Ability to backup a database across a firewall
* Support for encryption and compression of backup images
* New pluggable architecture
* A scheduling plug-in that lets DBAs postpone backups based on DBA-defined thresholds
* Pre- and post-backup plug-ins that allow a DBA to perform certain actions on MySQL before or after backup
* New, more flexible formatting for backup reports. For example, backup reports can be automatically received via RSS feed making it easier to consolidate reports for a dashboard or any monitoring application

In addition to the above information Zmanda has done backup and recovery benchmarks. Well those benchmarks shows me that ZRM has half the transfer rates as my own home build iSCSI SAN. 2-way Red Hat Enterprise 4 server with 4 GB of memory was able to copy large files with an average transfer rate of 37 Mb/s. I think that is fast!
You can read more about the ZRM benchmark and get the detailed benchmark white paper by following the links below.
Zmanda also provides the leading open source backup solution, Amanda Network Backup and Recovery solution with service and support.

Links;
Backup and recovery benchmarks with Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL
Amanda: Network Backup and Recovery.

Tags: MySQL, Backup, MySQL Backup, Network Backup, ZRM

Egenera Awarded Key New Patent for ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)

Egenera Awarded Key New Patent for Address Resolution Protocol System

MARLBORO, Mass. —February 20, 2007—Egenera Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced that that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,174,390 entitled, "Address resolution protocol system and method in a virtual network." Egenera has earned numerous patents in virtualization, disaster recovery and failover, and power and cooling since its inception in 2000.

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) within conventional Ethernet networks associates server and application IP addresses with their Ethernet addresses. In systems such as the Egenera® BladeFrame® system that emulate Ethernet semantics on a high-bandwidth, low-latency, point-to-point fabric, virtual circuits in the fabric direct traffic flow. Typically, it is necessary to further convert Ethernet addresses into virtual circuit numbers whenever traffic is sent—adding an extra table look-up for each transmission. Egenera's invention obviates the extra step by combining the virtual circuit table with the ARP table, lowering latency and processing overhead.

"Egenera has a rich history of both innovation and its practical application that drives measurable value for our enterprise customers," said Pete Manca, executive vice president of Engineering and CTO, Egenera. "With a world-class engineering organization, Egenera continues to build a strong intellectual property portfolio that extends our lead and furthers our mission to power the next-generation virtual datacenter."

Egenera was founded in March 2000 by Vern Brownell, former CTO of Goldman Sachs, based on his experience running one of the world's largest and most sophisticated datacenters. An early pioneer in pivotal markets such as virtualization, blade servers and utility computing, Egenera brings its experience and depth to a rapidly growing customer list of global enterprises, service providers and federal agencies.

About Egenera Inc.
Egenera is a global leader in delivering enterprise computing solutions that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera BladeFrame system simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business applications and achieve higher resource utilization, faster application time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide. For more information visit www.egenera.com or blogs.egenera.com, call 508-858-2600 or send email to info@egenera.com.

Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and BladeFrame are trademarks or registered trademarks of Egenera Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product names, service marks and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

links;
Egenera press release

Tags: ARP patent, Address Resolution Protocol, virtualization, disaster recovery, failover

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) today announce its worldwide OGF Affiliate Program

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) today announced its worldwide OGF Affiliate Program and the first five organizations participating in the program including: Grid Consortium Japan, Grid Forum-Netherlands, Grid Forum-Korea, The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT), and Grid Forum-Singapore.

OGF Affiliates are independent organizations with a legal charter and membership that focuses on grid issues and developments important to their local communities. OGF Affiliates recognize the value of both local and global outreach, education and active participation in shaping the best practices and global standards that enable grid adoption. They are critical contributors to OGF -- serving the interests of a segment of the global grid community consistent with the mission and principles of OGF.

The OGF Affiliate program provides an important 2-way communication channel for feedback and alignment on global standardization issues. It enables consortia from around the world to experience the benefits of aligning with OGF's global mission of accelerating grid adoption.

Links;
The Open Grid Forum

80 core teraflop CPU from Intel

Intel's APAC corporate communications manager Nick Jacobs says just ten years ago, the first computer to benchmark at one Teraflops was the ASCI Red. This comprised nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro CPUs each running at 200MHz and used up 500 kiloWatts of power. In comparison, the new Teraflops research chip uses a mere 62 Watts.

The chip mainly developed in Intel India research labs brings a new era to the field of supercomputing.
The eighty-core research chip, running at one Teraflops, was announced at the Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco today.

The chip gives you 1.01 teraflops at 3.16GHz and what happens if the chip is over clocked to 5.7GHz? yes you get nearly two teraflops, 1.81. But Intel says this increases the energy intake and it is much better to scale the chip in core wise rather tan increasing the frequency

Follow the links the get more info and data.

Links;
Intels supcomputr in a chip

Tags: intel, supercomputer in a chip, teraflop, APAC, ASCI Red