A Java Green Moment : Consolidation, CoolThreads Servers and Energy
posted Friday, 16 May 2008
| | A Java Green Moment. So the question is - when you run Java apps on your server or within virtualized containers - what are the implications on power and cooling (two expensive items in your datacenter - whether you have a couple of systems or a fleet)? Specifically, today I'll focus on watts (power). Sun has spent a lot of time on this issue. One of the reasons I like the Coolthreads servers is they basically give you a big win in performance in usually in half the space (less to cool) and roughly about 2.5 times better performance/watt over competitors. That's also a big win - energy- wise. Basically the latest T5140 and T524 provide 2 sockets per system, each socket provides 8 cores and | each core provides 8 hardware threads giving you 64 threads per socket. The result is 128 hardware threads per system. All of this is contained in a 1U or 2U form factor. If you start making comparisons between various systems the T-Series, it can give you much more performance/watt in much less space. You can see that T- Series vastily outperforms popular competing systems you can look at results for SPECjbb2005 and get more details (and disclosures) or the SPECjAppServer2004 results and you get a pretty clear picture of why I like the CoolThreads servers. You can even go to the single socket Coolthreads servers like the T5120 and T5220 and see very similar results. For example, the T5120 single socket also outperforms a number of the popular competing systems in the SPECjbb2005 results and also look at the T5220 results for SPECjbb2005 and SPECweb2005 results. It is not simply the outright sheer performance wins that are interesting - it's also the huge performance per watt and SWaP numbers that constitute a really nice win for energy conservation. I mean, if you can save money and do the same thing faster - why waste the energy ? Incidentally, Sun has power calculators such as this T5220 calculator here. The big push in the industry around virtualization is a reaction to over-crowded datacenters and underutilized systems and increasing power and cooling costs. The coupling of T-Series with virtualization technologies like Solaris Containers and LDOMs minimize datacenter power needs. Two papers of interest are Virtualization and Logical Domains and Sun Coolthreads Servers and the more general (slightly out-of-date) Sun Blueprint : Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide (a generic tutorial on Solaris Containers). Consolidation using Solaris Containers and more recently LDOMs are routine - containers and LDOMs are built into the operating system (you don't have to go buy them - they are free - and open source).
Sun has a Try-and-Buy program site (basically a 60 day trial - you can see how it works) and the site actually has a lot of material on how T-Series works and tuning recommendations and details on Cooltools and CoolStack. There is also a new whitepaper, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5140 and T5240 Servers Architecture, which covers the architecture. To get a good picture of the performance of the T2 Plus check out David Dagastine's blog on the SPECjbb2005 Multi-JVM benchmark. Note he mentions that the CoolThread systems have taken the triple crown -
SPECjbb2005
SPECweb2005
SPECjAppServer2004
Clearly, Java performance is excellent on these systems but what makes this especially interesting to me, is that all of this has as its background, much lighter power consumption needs than rivals. Check out some very nice blogs on the T-Series topics here. I've mentioned what cooltools and coolstack are previously - Cooltools provides a set of tools with useful optimization, compiler, profiling and test tools and CoolStack packages a nice highly optimized open source web stack. |
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