Afara Websystems Inc. was a Sunnyvale, California, USA server company whose goal was to build servers surrounding a custom high-throughput CPU architecture, "developing IP traffic management systems that will bring quality-of-service to the next generation of IP access infrastructure."^[1] The word "Afara" means "bridge" in the West African Yoruba language.^[2]

Contents 1 Founders 2 People of significance 3 History 4 Contributions and impact 5 References

[edit] Founders

• Kunle Olukotun, Stanford University professor
• Les Kohn, Microprocessor designer for: Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC; Intel i860 and i960; National Semiconductor Swordfish^[3]
• Fermi Wang, computing industry insider

[edit] People of significance

• Fred DeSantis, the Vice President of Engineering for Horizontal Systems at Sun
• Rick Hetherington, Chief Architect for Horizontal Systems at Sun
• Mike Splain, Chief Technology Officer for the Processor Group at Sun

[edit] History

Professor Kunle Olukotun was talking with people running data centers in 2000 and understood the problem of those centers running out of power and space. Olukotun believed that multiple processors on a chip in conjunction with multi-threading could resolve those problems.

Olukotun searched for venture capital support, on the basis that a new architecture could lead to a 10x performance increase in server processing capabilities. Venture capitalists introduced Olukotun to microprocessor architect Les Kohn.

Les Kohn designed microprocessors for both Sun and Intel. He was not interested in designing another processor, but was convinced by Olukotun to become involved in another processor design.

Another meeting with venture capitalists was scheduled on September 11, 2001. The meeting in New York City was interrupted by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, but resumed in a hotel 2 days later. Available capital for funding the server company had vanished, as the economy started to dup into a new recession in 2001.

Rick Hetherington left Sun to create a start-up company. Venture capitalists Sequoia Capital introduced Hetherington to Olukotun. When Hetherington's startup failed, he returned to Sun. Hetherington wrote memos to Mike Splain, CTO of the Processor group at Sun, encouraging technology acquisition of Afara Websystems. Hetherington became Chief Architect for Horizontal Systems at Sun, which develops and sells servers for data centers and Web systems.

Although SPARC-based computers systems are almost exclusively deployed with the Solaris Operating System, Afara instead planned to use Linux on the SPARC-based processor they developed.

The search for venture capital continued, since creating a server company requires substantial resources, but there was little available during the recession following 9/11. Afara began negotiations with Sun Microsystems, and the acquisition was consummated in July 2002.^[4] This new acquisition fell under the umbrella of Fred DeSantis, the vice president of engineering for horizontal systems at Sun.

[edit] Contributions and impact

The project included many technology contributions among Linux, Solaris and SPARC. The Afara CPU used a SPARC port of Debian Linux initially.^[5][6] Debian Linux contributions to Afara Websystem's former CPU architecture continued to grow, including commercial support for Ubuntu, a Debian-based Linux operating system.^[7] Afara Websystems' former platform direction seemed further validated when Sun hired Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian distribution, to head operating system platform strategy, and cross-pollinate Solaris with a new OS packaging technology similar to that of Debian Linux.^[8]

The new CPU architecture of Afara Websystems, which became known as "Niagara", had enough merit to cause a competing internal Sun project under DeSantis' organization, called "Honeybee", to be canceled.^[2]

Pressure was placed on the computing industry to add cores and threads. While competing microprocessor vendors were designing dual-core chips with two dual-threads per core, the original "Niagara" architecture was a more radical design: an eight core processor with four threads per core.^[9]

The new family of SPARC microprocessors, trademarked by Sun as "CoolThreads", was released with model names of UltraSPARC T1 ^[10](in 2005), UltraSPARC T2 ^[11](in 2007), and UltraSPARC T2 Plus (in 2008). While SPARC is an open instruction set architecture, where vendors build their own processors to an open specification defined by SPARC International^[12], this new family of microprocessors was not only created to the open specification, but its implementation was now free, where people could download the source code, and manufacture them independently.^[13]

For web serving loads, Sun had catapulted to become the uncontested fastest single processor on the planet in December 2005, performing 7x faster than the closest Intel server, and has been consistently the highest throughput web server, with the closest competition being 2x-3x slower (socket to socket comparison) as of mid-2009.^[14]

Olokotun returned to Stanford University to head its "Pervasive Parallelism Lab" in 2008, to help shape the future of software, as he did with hardware.^[15]

[edit] References