c0t0d0s0.org

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.

The OpenVZ project announced the port of OpenVZ to the UltraSPARC T1. Choice is good, but we have Container inside of Solaris right now, LDOMs in the next weeks and XEN in production solaris within this year. I don´t really see the point for an additional virtualisation system on this processor besides of the "been there-done that" factor.

The review at hardware.info starts with a comment which is certainly true: Within all the news about Intel and AMD, you might think that all other companies leaved the processor business. It´s hard to speak agains marketeers who tout the addition of 200 MHz to a cpu as the next revolution of CPU technology. But this only by the way ....
In 8 processor cores on a chip they describe and explain the T1000/T2000 in some depth. A really interesting read. And i like comments like:

No one can deny that Sun has hit a rough patch, but time and time again they don't fail to surprise the market with their well thought-out products. What Apple is for the desktop world, Sun is for networking and server solutions.

Yet another positive review of a Sun system at Network Computing: Analysis: Next-Gen Blade Servers. Although we didn´t win the shootout (you can argue about the metrics) the overall attitude and commentary to the system is very positive:

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System stems from Sun's decision to use a passive midplane concept that passes the PCI Express system bus through the system, rather than using blade-based GbE, FC or InfiniBand I/O fabrics.

and

But, considering that a fully-loaded Sun Blade 8000 Modular System offers the processing equivalent of 10 conventionally racked, four-socket 4U servers, the 8000 is an impressive, brushed aluminum tower of power.

The whole system will be even more impressive, when you take into consideration, that there will be UltraSPARC T1 blades for the system real soon now (I don´t think i tell you an secret here, as the changelog for Opensolaris already revealed it). Imagine a blade server where you can mix and match the processor technologies you need to fullfil your tasks with an uniform Solaris Operating Environment as an umbrella over the system.

Diese Präsentation muss ich mir unbedingt besorgen. Der Vortrag hat wirklich umfassend beschrieben, wie man mit der SSL-Beschleunigung der UltraSPARC T1 CPUs umgeht. Ich werd einfach mal fragen, ob ich den Inhalt ins Deutsche uebersetzen und in mein Wiki setzen darf. So ... nun gehts weiter in einen Vortrag ueber ZFS

After we open-sourced the design of the UltraSPARC T1, i´ve predicted here in my blog and at customer presentation, that we will see stripped-down version of the the T1 sonner or later for the embedded market. And the "sooner or later" is right now. The processor is called S1 and can be obtained unter GPL at Simply Risc. It´s a slightly extended single-core version of the T1.

I looked for a project into the SPEC website today and saw that the T2000 still leads the SPECweb2005 benchmark by roughly 4000 points. And this benchmark was made on the T2000 in November last year. Even the new Woodcrests stopped short of 10000 points and that were already fully blown 4 core systems (maximum for Woodcrest right now). Now keep in consideration that Niagara II already runs in our labs. Interesting times . Well ... Rolf, we should do the power meter gag again next cebit

Since the integration of the floating point coprocessor in the x86 processors nobody really thought about floating point. Now they are ubiquitous and a high percentage of users think about it as nescessary. Joseph Darcy talks about what every computer programmer should know about floating point arithmetic. After this you understand, why floating point is quite unusual in many commercial software. Floating point arithmetic is such an unaccurate stuff, unusable when both sides of your quarterly report has to match. This fact enables the development of a processor (the UltraSPARC T1) with only one FPU without beeing slow in many tasks.

Normally i don´t quote our own press releases, but this one is really interesting: Sun Fire T1000 Server With CoolThreads(TM) Technology Outperforms All Competing 1U Systems on the Market

Sorry, but this sounds to me like moving deck chairs on the Titanic. The solution of the heat problems on x86-Systems is not reducing the power consumption. The solution are better fans. Wow. What a ingenious idea. And what do you make with the hot air in the datacenter. Even faster fans in the climate control systems ? Hot air doesn't disappear by blowing it out of your server. And this is the rationale behind liquid in the datacenter: You need it in your server to get the heat out of you racks and to avoid hot spots in your datacenter layout.
So the argument "I think I just found a way to keep liquid out of our servers for another 10 years." is utter bullshit, the wording "I think I Just found a way to keep our blades from wrecking up by heat until the next intel heatplates are available" would be much better. Don't take me wrong: It's a nice solution to make better fans, but it doesn't really solve any energy problem. Sun developed UltraSPARC T1 exactly out of this reason. You don't have cool down air, you havn't heated up at the first place.
But this is the problem, when you have almost no processor technology you develop on your own. You can't solve the root cause, so you have to move the deck chairs. And hell, the rails at the bow needs some paint from all the idiots standing there and shouting "I'm the king of the world".

The third operating system is available for the T1: FreeBSD is selfhosting now. It´s stable enough to run through a make buildworld. It´s facinating how fast the ports are done to this architecture.
I think that the delopers see the T1 as an very attracting target. And additionally the ports are done against sun4v, not against the T1. sun4v was developed to build an abstraction between processor hardware and operating system, so the work on kernel ports should be done for the foreseeable future.

Here is another T2000 review. This one has mysql as the focus:

Man our T2000 rocks out for MySQL serving. It requires a bit of tuning to get going, but it our scales our existing Opteron clusters 4-20 to 1.

itweek resports about about Jonathans statements regarding support of Ubuntu and UltraSPARC T1. Well, i would still use Solaris (alone for dtrace and zones), but this really opens another market for the T2000.

news.com reports about Colms Benchmarks on the T2000. Most interesting comment from Colm cited in the article:

The Niagara servers only consumed about 220 watts while the Itanium sucked up 400 watts. "We were kind of surprised about the power consumption" on the T2000, he said. "I thought maybe my power meter wasn't working."

When you don´t believe you us or a vendor-supplied tool, when we talk about the need of energy efficent servers, talk with your HVAC guy.

When talking with the HVAC guy before he left he said something interesting. "Don't buy Dell." He's not a server guy, he's not in IT, he's an HVAC guy. "They run hot as hell," he noted.