Running on Sun Enterprise 10000 StarFire
You probably happen to read this page if you clicked banner "Powered by StarFire". This banner indicates that service in use is running on one of most famous supercomputers ever made. Originally priced between one to ten millions of dollars, they came to aftermarket and sometime are in hands of hobbyists.
Images © of Sun Microsystems
My apps
- Data mining project where I index whole internet (as much I can) and extract thumbnails from EXIF headers of JPEG images.
If original image and thumbnail are different, this link gets published on web page. Most resource consuming is database part as
it gets heavy. Database consist hundreds of millions URLs and I am running StarFire domain for database. Domain is made from
four systemboard having 1 400Mhz CPU ang 4G RAM each. For data storage Sun A5200 array is used with 10x73G disks. Software part
is Solaris 10, combined usage of UFS and ZFS filesystems and MySQL 5 with InnoDB engine. Indexer itself runs usually on PC but
sometime I also use e10k. Previously I ran database also on PC but it was always blocking in IO and whole stuff went slow. On
Starfire when I have temporary demand for some huge query I just add memory and CPUs on fly and remove them after.
- Secure servers. I have need for running some applications under very strict security rules. To achieve this often I use
separate Starfire domains. They provide physical separation which makes me trust it much more that any other fancy "trusted to
be secure" solution.
Links
- Cray Cyber people run different Cray computers as hobby project and also have an e10k. Noticeable that they provide free access to their hardware.
I have occassional info about 5..6 e10k-s but will wait for their publications on web or some little confirmation that I can publish info. If you have such information, let me know on tonu@jes.ee.
