Around 01, my good friend Tim Cramer and I worked together on Java performance team at Sun Microsystems. At the time, Sun was the launch of a new computer server called Starcat. The Starcat later officially dubbed the SunFire E15000, was a huge beast. With a price tag over $ 1 million, it was the size of a refrigerator and included an unthinkable 72 processors on a single background basket consistently.
Our job was to make the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) works effectively on this system. We have spent tuning and tweaking months before the launch of this machine, and I look back on that time as one of the funniest moments in my career. This was my first exposure to running the software scale .
A few years later, around 07, I got involved with another project called Ranger. Ranger, at the time, was built by the University of Texas to be fastest supercomputer in the world. It consisted of about 4000 physical computer systems, networked on an ultra-fast Infiniband network.
While I initially thought of as massive Starcat, being the size of a large refrigerator, Ranger was closer to the size of a football field! It was designed to address the biggest problems of scientific computing worlds as weather forecasting and simulation of nuclear fusion.
The management of this beast as a coherent set of resources was undertaken extensive. We used a program like Ops Center and Grid Engine. We had to push these products to their limits and it was a great learning experience. It took months of experimentation to really make everything work together.
More recently, I joined Citrix and started working on Citrix CloudPlatform (powered by Apache CloudStack). CloudStack is software that helps customers provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS). IaaS allows users to generate new computers, complete with storage and networking using different virtualization technologies.
In essence, it allows users with relatively basic system administration skills to create and manage massive virtual datacenter. Citrix since my arrival, I began to meet with clients which are systems that are running 10 times larger than Ranger. The scale is increasing.
This week I'm Collab CloudStack Conference in Amsterdam, where we met the community that built this amazing software. This week, we'll talk about where we take this software and what comes after.
Although there are many sessions for people interested in different subjects, to me, one thing that remains interesting is this idea of scale. What comes next?
A goal I was chatting with one of the engineers recently was what it would take to create a virtual data center with over one million virtual computer servers in a single day. He is a big, hairy, audacious goal, but there is no doubt that we can do it.
What will people do with all that computing power? They find ways to change the world.
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