The ultra-lovely Sun T-2000 has returned home. Many thanks to Sun for their generous loan of hardware. The ABC conjecture code ran superbly on it, as did the Java-based RBNB Data Turbine. I really wish I could get 2 or 3 of these for work; they’d make superb servers for a lot of what we do. The rack efficiency is amazing. Not a single crash, glitch, failure, complaint or issue in the entire 60+ day loan. And we ran it 24/7 with a load of 32! (One thread per ‘cpu’). Sun hardware was, when I was in school, the thing to get. Much more reliable the PC-based Unix, well engineered (cooling, for example) and designed to last for years. This machine gave off the same impression, and is well priced. I have renewed hope that Sun can survive and thrive, and wish them the best.

ObDisclaimer: In a hopefully-unrelated event, I won $1000 from Sun’s educational outreach after filling out a survey on campus. If they’re this together, I expect a fully operational Death Star to appear from the dark side of the moon next.

Update 11/21/06: Added data turbine URL.

Update 11/20/07: Actually managed to buy one at work, been working well for months now. Does run DataTurbine incredibly well, using 12GB of memory!