Sizing Up Fibre Channel over Ethernet

It used to look like Fibre Channel over ethernet (FCoE) was the red-headed stepchild of the storage networking zoo.  It sort of seemed like a mix of the worst parts of iSCSi and Fibre Channel.  But this article paints the technology as a glass-half-full, instead  Well worth the read.

iSCSI: Game over • The Register

FCoE levels the block-level access playing field. There’s no longer the marketing distinction between a Fibre Channel array – fast, costs more – and an iSCSI array – slower, less reliable access, cheaper. It’s all Fibre Channel. The distinction will move to the media inside the array and the array software. So all iSCSI array vendors will need to rethink their marketing propositions and retool their product strategies.

Published in:  on October 16, 2008 at 3:10 pm Leave a Comment

How Java 7 scales on multi-core systems.

Since compilers that automatically spot and parallelize sequential operations is not in sight, making the manual process simple may be the best we can do to take advantage of of the power of multicore systems.  This contains a good description of the performance problem and the attempts to tackle it.

Guest View: Java + multicore = good news – SD Times On The Web

So while programmers still have to convert their algorithms manually to distributed ones, it would be of immense help to base those algorithms on well-known, and well-implemented, concurrency primitives. One such primitive is the Java fork/join framework, created by Doug Lea under the auspices of the JSR166 expert group.

Described as a multicore-friendly, lightweight parallel framework, fork/join uses the strategy of recursively splitting a task into smaller subtasks; forking the subtasks into separate processes or threads, so that they run in parallel on multiple cores; and joining all subtasks to compose a result to return. Expected to be added to Java 7, it will boost the ease of writing parallel programs in Java.

Published in:  on at 2:35 pm Leave a Comment

New Macbook tear down

Gizmodo posted this article at ifixit.  Pictures and instructions on how to service your new Macbook.  A handy article to have if you are going to buy one.

MacBook Pro Unibody First Look

Published in:  on at 1:47 pm Leave a Comment