While I agree with the general idea, the author predicts that this will marginalize IT as a field, which seems counter-intuitive. While this kind of computing does allow fewer people to manage more systems, it does make that management that much more complicated. Further, IT has always been about helping users as much as maintaining infrastructure. So I don't see the general IT realm getting eaten by other fields, but rather splintering into specialists in networking, storage, (virtual) system administration, support, etc.
Finally, I found this quote pretty funny:
Teenagers entering higher education today are already skilled at building personal application spaces on Facebook using software modules. It’s a small step to apply those principles to business applications.
"A small step" to go from facebook to a crucial business application? Seems unlikely.
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The article explains the difference in detail. Now, I can understand why it's too difficult to run Java Web server on OpenVZ for evaluating TPCW benchmarks.
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There is some good information about adaptive power management at Berkeley. It appears to be a position statement/paper in construction arguing for power management in data centers.
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By way of slashdot, we find that the Linux kernel (2.6.23 and up) now sports three virtualization techniques out-of-box: KVM, Xen (just merged), and Lguest (also recently merged).
Lguest in particular looks interesting, as it doesn't require virtualization hardware support (like KVM), but is as simple as a single modprobe (as opposed to the Xen behemoth). Performance isn't too great right now, though (-30%).
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This Ars Technica article spotlights the development of power-aware technologies at the chip, system, network, and data center levels. It analyzes recent developments in terms of granularity, i.e. the frequency of reaction. Overall, a well written article.
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This article talks about the performance issues on multi-core system. It basically recommends to use the parallelism, such as OpenMP, in order to take full advantage of it. It also gives the common issues limiting the performance. I think it's a very good article to summarize idea.
http://www.devx.com/go-parallel/Article/34428
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Here are the paper list proposing research using the OpenMP library in Power-aware computing area.
1. Chun Liu, et. al, "Exploiting Barriers to Optimize Power Consumption of CMPs", IPDPS 2005.
This work is to use slack time among processors. By figuring out stall time at the end of each iteration, it reduces the frequency to save power without performance degradation. The evaluation in th paper is done only with simulator, not real experiment. SpecOMP is used to verify the idea.
2. Matthew Curtis-Maury, et. al, "Online Power-Performance Adaptation of Multithreaded Programs using Hardware Event-Based Prediction", ICS 2006.
This paper designed and implemented a framework that can adaptively regulate the concurrency level during program execution. So, the processors/threads configuration is changed based to achieve near-optimal energy efficiency. It build power/performance models and uses the hardware counters. For evaluation, 4 hyperthreaded Intel processors are used.
3. Jian Li, et. al, "Dynamic Power-Performance Adaptation of Parallel Computation on Chip Multiprocessors", HPCA 2006.
This paper proposes a heuristic method to determine # of processors and frequency level on one CMP node. All evaluation are performed on simulator. It does not expand the approach to multiple CMP nodes.
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This presentation file explains why the hybrid of MPI/OpenMP programming is required.
It comes with the examples and strategies.
Also, it talks about when the hybrid mode performs better.
http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/services/tr ... hybrid.ppt
Also, here are the paper list focusing on the performance in hybrid MPI/OpenMP applications.
1. Felix Wolf, et. al, "Automatic performance anlysis of hybrid MPI/OpenMP applications", Journal of Systems Architecture 2003.
2. Laksono Adhianto, et. al, "Performance Modeling of Communication and Computation in Hybrid MPI/OpenMP applications", ICPADS 2006.
3. Edmond Chow, et. al, "Assessing Performance of Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Programs on SMP Clusters"
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The ext3cow file system has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. This extension to ext3 adds "copy on write" (cow) functionality, which in turn allows the user to view the file system as it existed in the past. Unlike fixed checkpointing, this means that a user could dial in any time whatsoever, and see a consistent filesystem from that moment. It would be interesting to see what the performance characteristics of the system are.
If you're interested, you can get it from ext3cow.com; it consists of a kernel patch based on kernel 2.6.20.3, as well as some userland tools.
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By way of slashdot, this Exoid article details how to make sure Windows uses the S3 sleep state, even for an always-on server. Also linked is this handy reference to the possible ACPI sleep states.
Perhaps something like this could be developed into a vehicle for low-utilization servers?
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