c0t0d0s0.org

There must be a standard course at the IBM marketing school. The tricks of the benchmarkting are the same again and again. At least it doesn´t get boring to read at the IBM website. Now i found another benchmarketing stunt at their website. It´s called "Move Up to IBM Power Systems".

It was really fun to read it. IBM Benchmarketing - now with 100% more nonsense. One important disclaimer: The following article just contains the stuff that was obvious at my first read. I have a daytime job that isn´t dissecting IBM marketing stunts

heise.de hat einen sehr wohlwollenden Artikel über unsere neuen Server auf Basis des UltraSPARC T2+ prozessors veröffentlicht: Suns Enterprise-Server T5440 mischt die Szene auf:

Mit dem neuen Vierprozessor-Server SPARC Enterprise T5440 stellen Sun und Fujitsu unter Beweis, dass mit der SPARC-Architektur in der Serverwelt weiterhin zu rechnen ist.

und

Mit solchen Ergebnissen haben Sun und Fujitsu eine gute Chance, verloren gegangenes Terrain im HPC- und Supercomputer-Bereich wieder zurück zu erobern.

Denis Sheahan wrote two insightful articles to the architecture of the T5440. The first one is about the architecture of the system in general. The system is really an elegant design. By the the way: The similarities to the X4600 chassis are not an accident

The second one is about a chip, that made this system possible at all - the Zambezi ASIC:

Coming out of each UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor are 4 independent coherence planes. The T2 plus has 8 banks of L2 cache and each plane is responsible for the traffic from two of these banks. The plane is identified by two bits (12 and 13) of the Physical address. There are 4 Zambezi hubs in the system, each handling a single coherence plane. Each Zambezi is connected to each of the four T2 Plus processors over four separate point-to-point serial coherence links Because planes are independent there are no connections between the Zambezi chips.

At 256 threads some of the Solaris commands have a really long output:Solaris on the T5440. Just look at the mpstat output at the end of the article

256 compute threads, 512 GB of main memory and just announced : Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) jointly announced the SPARC Enterprise T5440

"... 7,520 SAP SD Benchmark users ...", "14,000 active Siebel benchmark users was set on a single SPARC Enterprise T5440 server" and "Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 chips, 32 cores, 256 threads): SPECint_rate2006 - 301, SPECfp_rate2006" are just a few numbers you will find in the press release at Sun Sets Multiple World Records with New Solaris-Powered Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server. You will find further informations about the system on the sun.com website.

The following numbers are really interesting as well. I did some calculations in the Sun SE T5440 power calculator. At full load fully loaded with options (512 GB memory, 4 HDD, 4 Procs@1,4Ghz, 2 PCIe cards, 2 XAUIs) the system just takes 1906 Watts. At full load but with minimal 4proc configuration (32 GB Memory, 2 HDD, 4 Procs@1,2 GHz, no XAUI or PCI cards) the system just takes 942 Watts.

(Substantiation of the benchmarks in the press release)