Allan Packer's Weblog

Today Sun is announcing new CMT-based systems, hard on the heels of the UltraSPARC T2 systems launched in October 2007 (the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 systems). Whereas previous Sun CMT systems were based around a single-socket UltraSPARC T1 or T2 processor, the new systems incorporate two processors, doubling the number of cores and the number of hardware threads compared to UltraSPARC T2-based systems. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip includes 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores, so the Operating System sees a total of 128 CPUs. The new systems deliver an unprecedented amount of CPU capacity in a package this size, as evidenced by the very impressive benchmark results published today.

Systems come in both 1U and 2U packaging: the 1U Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 ships with two UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips, each with 4, 6, or 8 cores at 1.2 GHz, and the 2U Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 ships with two UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips, each with 6 or 8 cores at 1.2 GHz, or 8 cores at 1.4 GHz. For more information about the systems, a whitepaper is available which provides details on the processors and systems.

Once again, some of the engineers who have worked on these new systems have shared their experiences and insights in a series of wide-ranging blogs (for engineers' perspectives on the UltraSPARC T2 systems, check out the CMT Comes of Age blog). These blogs will be cross referenced here as they are posted. You should expect to see more appear in the next day or two, so plan on visiting again later to see what's new.

Here's what the engineers have to say:

• UltraSPARC T2 Plus Server Technology. Tim Cook offers insights into what drove processor design toward CMT. Marc Hamilton serves up a brief overview of CMT for those less familiar with the technology. Dwayne Lee touches on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip. Josh Simons offers us a look under the hood of the new servers. Denis Sheahan provides an overview of the hardware components of the UltraSPARC T2 Plus sytems, then follows it up with details of the memory and coherency of the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. Lawrence Spracklen introduces the crypto acceleration on the chip. Richard Elling talks about RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) in the systems, and Scott Davenport describes their predictive self-healing features.
• Virtualization. Honglin Su announces the availability of the Logical Domains 1.0.2 release, which supports the UltraSPARC T2 Plus platforms. Eric Sharakan offers further observations on LDoms on T5140 and T5240. Ning Sun discusses a study designed to show how LDoms with CMT can improve scalability and system utilization, and points to a Blueprint on the issue.
• Solaris Features. Steve Sistare outlines some of the changes made to Solaris to support scaling on large CMT systems.
• System Performance. Peter Yakutis offers insights into PCI-Express performance. Brian Whitney shares some Stream benchmark results. Alan Chiu explains 10 Gbit Ethernet perfomance on the new systems. Charles Suresh gives some fascinating background into how line speed was achieved on the 10 GBit Ethernet NICs.
• Application Performance. What happens when you run Batch Workloads on a Sun CMT server? Giri Mandalika's blog shares experiences running the Oracle E-Business Suite Payroll 11i workload. You might also find Satish Vanga's blog interesting - it focusses on SugarCRM running on MySQL (on a single-socket T5220). Josh Simons reveals the credentials of the new systems for HPC applications and backs it up by pointing to a new SPEComp2001 world record. Joerg Schwarz considers the applicability of the UltraSPARC T2 Plus servers for Health Care applications.
• Web Tier. CVR explores the new World Record SPECweb2005 result on the T5220 system, and Walter Bays teases out the subtleties of the SPEC reporting process.
• Java Performance. Dave Dagastine announces a World Record SPECjbb2005 result.
• Benchmark Performance. The irrepressible bmseer details a number of world record results, including SPECjAppServer2004, SAP-SD 2 tier, and SPECjbb2005.
• Open Source Community. Josh Berkus explores the implications for PostgreSQL using virtualization on the platform. Jignesh Shah discusses the possibilities with Glassfish V2 and PostgreSQL 8.3.1 on the T5140 and T5240 systems.
• Sizing. Walter Bays introduces the CoolThreads Selection Tool (cooltst) v3.0 which is designed to gauge how well workloads will run on UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems.

Check out also the Sun CMT Wiki.