CoolThreads' Marambas Are Here And Already Java Record-Setting
posted Wednesday, 9 April 2008
The new CoolThreads Maramba servers were announced today. I was lucky enough to be involved with some of the engineers that created these systems and visited the labs a number of times to see what the pre-production units could do. Now they are shipping real production systems and there pretty amazing systems. If Sun's earlier CoolThreads systems were well received - especially for consolidation (and virtualization) of the DB/Java/web tier - these are going to really rock the boat. Up to now we have seen single socket CoolThreads systems with eight cores and 64 hardware threads, onboard 10GigE, 8 floating point units (one per core) and one encryption unit (one per core) in the T5120 and T5220 systems. Today the dual socket T2 Plus systems offer 128 hardware threads and a total of 16 cores per system. There is a 1U (T5140) and 2U (T5240) system that was introduced. Very simply :
system processors =
2 sockets x 8 cores per socket =
16 cores =
8 hw threads per core x 8 cores x 2 sockets =
128 hw threads | Jonathan if you are reading, I want one. I can think of a whole bunch of things I could use these for. Engineers, developers, DBAs and sys admins are going to love these systems and already we have seen some pretty cool blogs describing what people are doing with them. Check out Jignesh's blog on using resource pools, zones, PostgresSQL and Glassfish v2. He talks about the sheer power of these systems - run psrinfo and you get a report back of 128 cpus. David Dagastine's blog show the new T5240 systems doing some stunning Java record-setting - breaking the SPECjbb2005 records and in the process badly beating the IBM System P 570 which had 4 sockets of 4.7 Ghz Power6 cpus! Yow! I also ran into this nice whitepaper, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5140 and T5240 Server Architecture, that describes these systems. |  | |
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