Tag Archives: niagara

Sun’s Niagara2 Processor

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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:

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

Cooltools for Coolthreads are Coolstack

Leave a reply

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

10 Replies

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.

Sun Server Power Calculators online

1 Reply

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:

Sun Java System Web Server

Leave a reply

There are not so many articles on the web about running Sun Java System Web Server instead of apache or tomcat. The Sun Java System Web Server is not only a Web Server, it also includes a servlet container. There are also a lot of NSAPI modules available to integrate with other Application Servers like BEA Weblogic, Vignette V/7 etc.. Maybe the PHP integration, which I never tested in a project might not be so good. There’s a free PHP Enabler for the Sun Java System Web Server from Zend, but since a long time, it’s still Version 1.0… For those who want to run their Applications like Java Web Services based on Axis or the Roller open source blog server Blog Software on Sun Java System Web Server, this arcticle might be a good starting point. From my experience, Sun Java System Web Server is a really good and stable product, and I’m looking forward to see Version 7.0 which will support Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) within Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS). For all friends of our ne Sun Niagara T2000 Server, the on chip hardware SSL Accelerator is supported by the Web Server.