Yet another “The Network is the Computer” post

Johnathan Schwatrz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just posted something interesting and something I’ve never thought about.

Nowdays, server-side hardware is tending to focus on unilisation rather than sheer clock speed. I guess the point is to make more use of each single clock pulse. if you have 8 cores with 32 threads executing 32 instructions per clock pulse, it beats the hell out of a single core with a single thread exectuting one instruction per clock pulse. This is known as server virtualization . Essentially because you can assign a different OS ( never mind application) to each core, effectivly getting 8 servers ( in the case of the Niagra chip) for the price one one physical server. Not that you’d find 8 server OS’s, which is beside the point. But all this fancy stuff is usually dedicated to servers ( Intel Core Duos and Quads to the contrary). And servers need to be networked. And you only have one physical network to use. Or do you:

That’s why we just introduced Project Neptune – a silicon project that marries the parallelism of the microprocessor (for Intel, AMD and SPARC systems), with the parallelism of the underlying operating system (Solaris, Linux or Windows), with parallelism in the network itself. Which in concert with some software magic (which goes by the name of the Crossbow project) allows enterprises to collapse cabling, ports, cards and spending – by bringing parallelism to basic network infrastructure (for geeks, you can take multiple TCP streams and allocate them to different processor threads, spreading out load and freeing up CPU’s/ports). Ports become a physical convenience, just like a server – what’s happening inside depends upon rules or policies set by the user/administrator to automate such decisions. Like I said, the network is the computer, and the computer’s virtualized, so why not the network?

Its simply too obvious to notice till its pointed out. For each physical port attached to your machine, you can have one physical connection. Here Sun engineers have turned that inside out, giving network engineers more bang for their buck ( or is that more connections for their ports?).

It really is an elegant solution.