Thorleif Wiik » Coolthreads

Sun’s Niagara2 Processor

Thorleif Wiik — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:48:00 +0000

More and more information about the upcoming Niagara2 Processor is on the web.

What’s new about the Ultrasparc T2 Processor?

2nd generation CMT (Chip Multi-Threading) processor
8 Sparc Cores, 4MB shared L2 cache; Supports concurrent execution of 64 threads
2x UltraSparc T1′s throughput performance
10x UltraSparc T1′s improvement in Floating Point throughput performance
Two 10G Ethernet ports on chip

Hope to see some SPECjAppServer2004 results for Niagara2 servers with Glassfish oder Bea Weblogic, soon.

SPECjAPPServer2004 results for glassfish

Thorleif Wiik — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:52:19 +0000

There are a couple of published results for glassfish V1 aka Sun Java Systems Application Server 9.0 on different types of Server hardware:

One Sun T2000, One 1,2Ghz T1, 8 Cores: 521,42 JOPS
Three Sun X4100, each two 2,6Ghz AMD Opteron, 4Cores: 720,56 JOPS

compared to Bea Weblogic 9.0:

One Sun T2000, One 1,2Ghz T1, 8 Cores: 615,64 JOPS

Looking forward to see Glassfish V2 SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmarks for Servers with AMD Opteron, Intel ~~Woodcrest~~ Clovertown and Niagara2 …

Cooltools for Coolthreads are Coolstack

Thorleif Wiik — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:10:01 +0000

There’s a new Software collection, called Coolstack, offered by Sun with Open Source software, compiled with Sun Studio 11, optimized for Solaris/Ultrasparc Platform.

Currently, there are Sun packages with Apache HTTP Server 2.0.58, MySQL 5.0.22, PHP 5.1.4, Perl 5.8.8 and Squid 2.5.STABLE14 Web Proxy Cache. The Software installs to /usr/local/ .

Within each package there’s a README File, which shows you, what options have been used to compile each package.
This could be a good starting point, if you want to compile your own binaries with Sun Studio 11.

I hope that Sun will compile the already in Solaris 10 included Open Source Packages like apache, mysql, perl with these options in future, too. And maybe, Sun will also put PHP into the supported Solaris distro in the future, like all Linux vendors do.

Oracle 10g on Sun Fire T2000

Thorleif Wiik — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 21:17:11 +0000

There’s a new whitepaper about running Oracle 10gR2 Database on a Sun T2000 Niagara Server. Summary: When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving a 3x better price / performance ratio.

Coolthreads

Thorleif Wiik — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:16:40 +0000

Today, we installed a couple of new Sun Server in one of our datacenters. On the picture, you can see one Sun T2000 and three Sun X4200.

Sun Server Power Calculators online

Administrator — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:45:00 +0000

For a lot of Servers, Sun offers new Power Calculators online.

Really good to calculate the total system Power in Watts and the BTU/Hour for individual Server configurations. The new calculators are available for SPARC and AMD Opteron Servers: