http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/print.html
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/
Itanium inventor bobs to surface as chip's savior?
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk)
Published Wednesday 1st December 2004 18:22 GMT
Exclusive Some start-ups are comprised of wide-eyed wheelers and dealers
with little technical expertise. Others have a decent mix of business types
and technology talents. Then there are start-ups like Secure64 Software
Corp. that have nothing but the richest pedigree of pure, unadulterated
genius running through their giddy veins.
The discovery of Secure64 happened by chance. The company's CEO Peter
Cranstone took exception with one of The Register's Itanium bashing
articles and sent an e-mail extolling the possible virtues of the chip.
This e-mail led to a brief look at Secure64's management team website at
which point jaws dropped and little hamsters started turning in heads.
Without slighting other members of the Secure64 team, we have to admit that
one name in particular caught our attention - Bill Worley, the startup's
CTO. Worley worked on a couple of minor projects during his lengthy tenure
at HP. Little things like being the principal architect of the PA-RISC
processor and later the principal architect of PA-WideWord - known today as
Itanium. Worley, however, didn't just do the initial Itanium designs, he
also led the decision, in 1993, to unite HP and Intel behind the project.
High-end computing has never been the same since - for better or for worse.
And few engineers have a more impressive resume.
Along with Worley, Secure64 has Cranstone, who co-developed the mod_gzip
data compression technology for the Apache web server. Its Chairman is
Denny Georg, former CTO of various parts of HP. Its VP of Product Delivery
is Joe Gersch who once managed HP's research and development organization.
But, as they say late at night, that's not all.
Larry Hambly, one of the first 100 employees at Sun Microsystems, also sits
on Secure64's advisory board along with Rajiv Gupta - the former GM of HP's
e-Speak web services unit and former head of the joint HP/Intel Itanium
development team.
Just an inconsequential, revolutionary OS
So what unambitious project are all these brains working on? Well, just the
creation of an abstracted type of operating system that could create
faster, more stable, more secure servers.
At present, Secure64 has declined requests for interviews with CEO
Cranstone saying the company will have a formal launch early next year.
This makes it a bit difficult to know exactly what the company is up to.
Thankfully, Worley has applied for a couple of patents that give a decent
idea of the direction Secure64 is taking.
At the heart of Worley's recent work is the notion that general purpose
operating systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows don't make the best use
of specific features in processors - namely features in Itanium. The
general purpose nature of today's server market means that systems perform
well on a wide-variety of applications, but the boxes aren't tuned as well
as they could be for specific tasks.
In the past, any number of companies have taken a stab at this problem by
creating server appliances designed to handle a small subset of
applications. Most of these appliances relied on sophisticated software to
make them different from the average server. Of late, other companies have
been trying to tackle the general purposeness of servers with various
add-ons. Products such as TCP/IP and SSL accelerators have arrived to speed
up the performance of boxes in specific areas.
The appliances and accelerators have largely been aimed at web edge types
of workloads - things like serving up web pages, processing web services
protocols and encryption. While load balancers and some security appliances
have been picked up a decent rate, most of these types of products really
haven't enjoyed much interest.
The boys at Secure64 appear to think they've figured out a way to make a
web edge system more attractive to customers.
An extensible application environment for you and me
Not surprisingly, the company's approach relies on making the most out of
Itanium.
When Itanium first hit the market, both Intel and HP spent a lot of time
touting some of the features that separated Itanium from other processors.
(They mention these features less often these days, focusing their
marketing efforts instead on defending the chip's existence.) The four main
features of Itanium at play here are its large register sets (128 general
purpose and 128 floating point registers), the fact that it can crank
through 6-8 instructions per cycle, its security compartments technology
and its 4 privilege levels - again for added security.
Secure64 rightly believes that none of the major OSes out there makes
