c0t0d0s0.org

Octave gives a nice peek under the hood of a Sun T5120.

Wow ... the Sun T5120 is the first single socket system to break the 10.000 SAPS barrier (you will find the certifcate here) ...

I wrote many entries about Niagara2 in the past and will write much about the systems when i´m back home in Germany (in the meantime Allan Packers link list is a really god start). So i won´t write about the systems now. Nevertheless i want to write about the event itself. It was really cool launch. As far as i know it was the only launch (at last since i work for Sun) in front of 4000 peoples with at least half of them wearing "I love Solaris"-tshirts. Jonathan made an excellent keynote before and so it was a kind of a special atmosphere that surrounded the event.

The event started with the usual presentation about the advantages of the new systems hold by John Fowler. Then Andy B. and Rick Hetherington (lead of the N2 development) joined the stage and the real metal was presented. And this metal is really cool. 64 Threads. 64 Gigabytes. There was a Constellation-chassis full of T6230 blades. Doesn´t sound impressive.? This rack contains 48 blades. 3072 Gigabytes of memory in one rack. 3072 threads in one rack. I find this really cool. After testimonials from Ichiro Hirose of Fujitsu and Jason Turner of Mediastile, John talked about the six records on benchmarks (ranging from specjbb over specweb to specfp) and led to the Q&A session.

Andy B. made on of the best comments when he answered the question about the Oracle Licensin with "There are several opsn-source databases out there which runs really good on this systems". He got instant applause for this comment. I assume, that many colleagues share my opinion about Oracle ("incredible expensive, political pricing and unneeded for many databases").

So ... it was a really cool event. I think it would be a good idea to keep this way to announce such groundbreaking products. There is no better auditorium for such announcement than 4000 engineers. Maybe we can get even more ecstatic as the Apple folks when we announce Rock and Supernova The systems would deserve it ...

PS: I don´t know if i´m correct, but i thing we´ve offically announced Project Etude (Solaris 8 container on Solaris 10) yesterday on one slide. It´s called Solaris 8 Migration Assistant.

This was the only presentation i´ve left early. Nothing new in it for people who try to stay informed and the presentation had room for improvement (to say it polite) . Nevertheless i can´t write about the contents of this presentations, as it was marked as "Sun internal" only. Enough said....

Rick Hetherington was in Munich today ... he gave a good presentation into the future of CMT SPARC and what we will see in the near and the middle term. Many people have the opinion, that Sparc will see it´s end soon, especially after the announcement of TI to stop investments in new process technologies. The direct opposite is true, more than ever. I was quite impressed. Unfortunately it´s not up to me to disclose things.

IBM announced the PVU for the UltraSPARC T2 a few days ago: Processor Value Unit Licensing for Distributed SW. An UltraSPARC T2 counts as 50 PVUs. That´s really good news. Why? Well, wait for the benchmarks and do the math yourself

BTW: The nice thing at PVUs: they have a political component. Thus PVUs are not really based of the real perfomance, they are based on the performance, IBM wants to admit. So, even when they don´t admit that T2 is better than Power6, they help us by making their software cheaper, and they can´t make them more expensive, as this would hurt their hardware bussiness by admiting, that T2 is better then Power6. Sometimes Catch-22´s are really funny ...

Die PC Games berichtet über Niagara2 in Schnellste CPU: Nicht von Intel oder AMD:

Die Werte des professionellen SPEC-rate-Benchmarks, welcher auch die Skalierung mit mehreren Kernen berücksichtigt, liefern einen großen Vorsprung gegenüber der Konkurrenz aus den Häusern Intel, AMD und auch IBMs Power6.

Hätte ja nicht gedacht, das mal aus der Richtung Lob kommt.

Lawrence Spracklen gives a detailed overview about the crypto performance of the Niagara II chip. Alexandre Chartre decribes in his blog the usage of Linux on an UltraSPARC T2 processor.

What did we announce yesterday? In my opinion, the most important chip for Sun. It´s even more important than Rock. When you look around, the loads for single threaded performance decrease, and as the complete industry turns in the direction of "more cores" (even IBM talks about this in the Power7 timeframe). Rock will be important for the highest end. But the future of general purpose computing begins right here, right now.

So, why is Niagara 2 so important. Niagara 1 had it´s weak points for general purpose computing. We decided to design a processor with such weaknesses, as we designed it with a certain workload in mind: Internet, a niche according to IBM and HP, but hey ... it´s a really big niche. Niagara 2 was designed as a general purpose CPU. The problem of the single FPU? Addressed ... the N2 has 8 of them? The issue of SSL-centric Crypto-circuits. Addressed ... they were subsituted by full-fledged crypto accelerators. You get 64 threads, you get two 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces with chipsets specifically designed for multi core processing, as they implement the processing tasks in a similar multithreaded way. You get eight lanes of PCI Express. 2 Gigabyte/s in and 2 Gigabyte/s out. Solely for storage attach, as you have already two really big fat pipes of Ethernet directly connected to the inner crossbar of the chip. 60 GB/s worth of memory bandwith.

The point of beeing only capable to run in single socket systems will be solved soon by Victoria Falls. Imagine a system of two or four this processors. Running on an operating system really capable to handle such large amounts of computing threads because four processor with 64 threads each means scheduling you processors on 256 hardware processor. Not an easy task.

Now many people will say: Each thread will only run on 1.4 Gigahertz. This is half as fast as a modern x86 CPU. But is this really a factor? Maybe you can do more cycles in a second, but what´s the gain, when you wait most cycles for memory. A T1/T2 swiches simply to a non-memory starved thread. This is one the reason why a 1.4 GHz CPU can be faster than a 4.7 GHz CPU in SPECfp rate and SPECint rate . It´s like my sister and me at playing racing games on her PC. I´ve lost every time in spite of having the faster car. The problem: I´ve lost traction in every curve of the race track and had to reaccelerate while my sister was able to take the curve without no problems. And: 1.4 Ghz is just the beginning.

IBM want´s to tell to plays it´s virtualisation card by saying: "But we have better virtualisation, we can do more than 64 LDOMS". But the decision for limit was a sentient one: When ever you want to switch to a virtual machine, you have to save the actual register sets and restore the stored register contents of the next vm into the register sets. Takes a vast amount of clock cycles. Now: A 64 threads processor has 64 register sets. By limiting the number of domains to the number of threads - i hope you´ve already got the point - you get an important advantage: Switch from a VM to the next in a clock cycle. Neat, isn´t it ?At the end, it´s not important to be able to partition the cpu into smallest fragments. It´s important that the performance isn´t evaporated by the VM layer. Or didn´t you asked your self, why there´s no benchmark result for a virtualized system in the large benchmark portfolio of IBM or why the VMware licence prohibits benchmarks? LDOMs virtualisation is virtualisation done right.

Now, as the N2 hasn´t the problem of the single FPU, that prevented N1 of beeing a general purpose CPU, the game changes again. 18 month after we did it with N1 the first time. With Niagara II you get a processor suitable for almost all tasks of computing. And as Jonathan said: You´ve ain´t seen nothing yet. But you see the future of computing today. And really soon in your datacenter.


PS: Maybe some statements are really bold ones. But when you´ve read, what i´ve read in the past, when you know what i know, when you saw what i saw you would be so enthusiastic as well.

BMseer compares the preliminary SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 results of Niagara2 with some other leading processor brands ... very encouraging.

Jonathan in Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business:

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

BTW: Now i know why there were several articles about N2, while i bite myself on my tongue all day long:

In the interim, on Monday a reporter accidentally violated our news embargo, which set off a flurry of press coverage.

And Rick Hetherington and Hal Stern state in Innovation@Sun: A System on a Chip – The Sequel:

And then being the leader in power efficiency, we paid special attention to how we can manage power internally, so we do have features like clock-gating, extensive clock-gating throughout the core. So if one is not running a floating point application, the clocks are not being submitted to that floating point unit.

David Yen in an interview with ZDnet:

"At the same time, we will [also] roll out a developer beta program in which we will provide access to Verilog RTL design file and test suites, so that we can get early feedback to refine our open source process and eventually complete the open-sourcing [of UltraSparc T2] by the summer of 2008," he explained.

And even a enterprise systems affine news sites like Engadget write about the announcement.
Timothy Prickett Morgan writes Sun Polishes Up Sparc T2 Multithreaded Chips:

Sun is not saying much about performance when it comes to the T2 chips, but the T2 is expected to have about 2.5 times the throughput performance of the T1, and Victoria Falls is expected to nearly double that again, with a 65 percent performance boost over the T2's at the system level.

The usual suspect at the Register wrote a nice piece about the Niagara II: Sun releases world's fastest chip - at 1.4GHz. Ashlee, you´ve ain´t seen nothing yet. Other benchmarks are even more impressing than SPECint rate or it´s floating point counterpart.

Merill Lynch (you remember: The former home of Steve Millunovich, who told us serveral times, that we are doomed and we have to cut R&D, the R&D that gave us Niagara. Sorry, could not resist) done a survey of CIOs with an interesting outcome regarding UltraSPARC T1:

According to the December survey, 41 percent of CIOs who already are Sun customers want to buy Niagara servers in the next 12 months, compared to 8 percent in July. And among CIOs in general, the purchasing intention increased from 3 percent to 12 percent over the same period.

and

"We believe...Sun's turnaround is real," Farmer said.

As the both links in my last entry weren´t enough. Paul Murphy predicts that Niagara2 will blow away SQL-Server Clusters:

So here's the easy part of my prediction: this thing will post traditional (TPC/C and TPC/H) RDBMS benchmark results beating clusters of eight to ten dual Xeons on absolute performance -while wumping them on cost and power consumption.

ZDNet reports about Niagara 2 in Sun: Niagara sequel more power-efficient. Good article but one heavy mistake: 10 Gigabit per second. Not 10 Megabit per second. We have 2006