Sun's Niagara is out

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Patrick Schaaf
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Matthias Wieser <matthias-usenet@gmx.de> writes:

Quote:

Download Apache, install Apache, run Apache, put some load on it, now
count the Apache processes and threads.

Or: Download samba, install samba, run samba, power up 32 clients which
connect to the samba file server, count the samba processes.

The real question is: Is there any serious server application which does
*not* use >32 processes or threads if under load?

No. The real question is: Is there any serious server application
deployment which does *not* have >32 processes/threads RUNNABLE,
most of the time.

It is irrelevant how many processes or threads there are, if they
are waiting for network or disk.

BTW, the real real question is, given the fact that most serious
(web) servers already run on more than one physical server, spreading
the load: how many Niagara systems would I need to replace, for example,
the 20 commodity (HP DL360) systems that currently run web server X?

best regards
Patrick

Ningi
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Rick Jones wrote:

Quote:

Ningi <ningi@eggsandspamblueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

If Sun get the SPECweb2005 result they refer to on their webpage
accepted ( http://www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads/ ) that should be
enough to convince people that the hardware scales well - up to it's
single chip limit.

I guess it depends on one's definition of "scaling" whether it would
be necessary to see a result from the same system with fewer cores at
the same frequency.

I think there's some examples of per core scaling on some of the Sun
blogs. Looked pretty good. Given that multiprocessor scalability has
been a Sun strong point for some years, scaling within a single socket
should be pretty good.

Pete

Jason Ozolins
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Douglas Siebert wrote:

Quote:

"David Kanter" <dkanter@gmail.com> writes:

I think Niagara will certainly be interesting for a lot of server
stuff, web serving, collaboration/email and some java stuff seems
likely. Beyond that is...uncertain. Certainly, it's not the kind of
machine you'd use for SAP...

Bullshit. There's nothing wrong with Niagara itself in terms of SAP. SAP
doesn't require maximum possible single thread performance, make much if
any use of FP, nor does it max out memory bandwidth. OK, badly written
ABAP will, but badly written code will always be a problem with no solution.

Indeed. Apparently Niagara runs SAP benchmarks quite well:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmseer#big_sap_sd_2_tier

-Jason

Douglas Siebert
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:08 pm Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Robert Klute <robert_klute_removethis@hp.com> writes:

Quote:

What the SUN blog didn't mention was
a 4 core HP BL25p at 974 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx7620 at 1240 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx4640 at 1320 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core IBM p570 at 1313 SD users (AIX/DB2)

The per-core performance is irrelevant here! The whole point of Niagara
is to offer better overall performance when measured in terms of watts
or dollars. Considering that the T2000 is a single socket system I
think it does pretty well versus far more expensive and power hungry
Itanium and POWER systems, and makes a pretty fair showing in terms of
price/performance TCO (taking power & cooling into account and not just
initial price) when compared to x86.

I know the sellers of oxen want to portray Niagara as a chicken, but I
think it is more of a mule :) (in reference to Seymour Cray's line,
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong
oxen or 1024 chickens?")

--
Douglas Siebert dsiebert@excisethis.khamsin.net

Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute. Set him on fire, and
he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Robert Klute
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 11:32 pm Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:51:34 +1100, Jason Ozolins
<jason_abroad@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

Quote:

Indeed. Apparently Niagara runs SAP benchmarks quite well:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmseer#big_sap_sd_2_tier

Which says that an 8 core / 32 thread SunFire T2000 achieved 950 SAP SD
users using Solaris/MaxDB. vs

a 4 core / 4 thread HP DL580 at 937 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
a 4 core / 4 thread HP rx4640 at 880 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core / 8 thread IBM p550 at 1000 SD users (Linux/DB2)

What the SUN blog didn't mention was
a 4 core HP BL25p at 974 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx7620 at 1240 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx4640 at 1320 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core IBM p570 at 1313 SD users (AIX/DB2)

See following for disclosures:
http://www50.sap.com/benchmarkdata/sd2tier.asp?fld=Number%20of%20Benchmark%20Users&ord=DESC

Bill Todd
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Robert Klute wrote:

Quote:

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:51:34 +1100, Jason Ozolins
jason_abroad@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

Indeed. Apparently Niagara runs SAP benchmarks quite well:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmseer#big_sap_sd_2_tier

Which says that an 8 core / 32 thread SunFire T2000 achieved 950 SAP SD
users using Solaris/MaxDB. vs

a 4 core / 4 thread HP DL580 at 937 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
a 4 core / 4 thread HP rx4640 at 880 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core / 8 thread IBM p550 at 1000 SD users (Linux/DB2)

What the SUN blog didn't mention was
a 4 core HP BL25p at 974 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx7620 at 1240 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx4640 at 1320 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core IBM p570 at 1313 SD users (AIX/DB2)

The main points, of course, being that

1. A single-socket Niagara box is far less expensive to purchase than
any of the configurations above, and

2. A single-socket Niagara box uses far less power (and is thus far
less expensive to run - and cool) than any of the configurations above.

Sun makes no claims that Niagara's single-thread (or even single-core)
performance matches most of the competition: that's clearly not what
the box is for (and it will offer UltraSPARCIV+ or SPARC64 platforms if
that's what you need).

But Niagara appears to be without current parallel for highly
multi-threaded server-style loads on a per-dollar or per-Watt basis, up
to its overall throughput limits (which the planned Niagara2 platform
should extend significantly to handle workloads which aren't readily
handled by clusters of Niagaras).

- bill

Niels Jørgen Kruse
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Robert Klute <robert_klute_removethis@hp.com> wrote:

Quote:

Don't these all use rather more power, which is the point of Niagara?

--
Mvh./Regards, Niels Jørgen Kruse, Vanløse, Denmark

Russell Crook - Computer
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

David Kanter wrote:

Quote:

Looks like you'll get a chance to prove it :-

The Verilog for the T1 chip is being open-sourced.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-12/sunflash.20051206.4.html

It will be interesting if
Sun comes up with any ideas of their own, though I guess they
can't publically admit there are scalability problems
before they come up with a solution.

I guess all those E10Ks, E6900s, F12Ks, F15Ks,
E20Ks, and E25Ks running highly scalable
commercial workloads just don't exist, then.

Yes, but how many of those workloads are suitable for Niagara? I bet I
can count the # of E25K's used for web serving on one hand, minus
several fingers.

I think Niagara will certainly be interesting for a lot of server
stuff, web serving, collaboration/email and some java stuff seems
likely. Beyond that is...uncertain. Certainly, it's not the kind of
machine you'd use for SAP...

Oh? See
http://www50.sap.com/benchmarkdata/sd2tier.asp
(at this time, the T2000 entry is the most recent one). It's hard to
compare because the SAP benchmark version changes, and of
course everyone uses different databases, but it seems
the SAPS rating of the T1 is comparable to 4-core Itanium and 4-core
Power5+ in absolute performance on this benchmark.

(As with any benchmark YMMV, no warranty express or implied,
not legally binding in the province of Quebec, etc. SAP is a
many headed beast, and I would expect variation in the
performance of some modeules vs. others.)

The T1 does quite well on most database-style applications.
There's a list of benchmarks at
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/benchmarks.jsp
for your viewing entertainment.

Russell

Quote:

David Kanter
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Quote:

Performance characterizations have shown that SAP tends to required
more CPU power than stuff like TPC-C. Now, Niagara appears to
perform...moderately well at SAP, but the problem is that you are still
talking about a proprietary platform. People are moving from Solaris
to Linux...not the other way around.

Quote:

I think the Niagara folks are probably smart enough to put in
reasonable amounts of RAS. If nothing else, you can get Xen for
Solaris and then do a cluster in a box with failover. It's not an
insoluble problem certainly.

Quote:

You'll have to forgive me, but why should I care about per socket
performance?

Quote:

David Kanter
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Douglas Siebert wrote:

Quote:

Robert Klute <robert_klute_removethis@hp.com> writes:

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:51:34 +1100, Jason Ozolins
jason_abroad@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

Indeed. Apparently Niagara runs SAP benchmarks quite well:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmseer#big_sap_sd_2_tier

Which says that an 8 core / 32 thread SunFire T2000 achieved 950 SAP SD
users using Solaris/MaxDB. vs

a 4 core / 4 thread HP DL580 at 937 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
a 4 core / 4 thread HP rx4640 at 880 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core / 8 thread IBM p550 at 1000 SD users (Linux/DB2)

What the SUN blog didn't mention was
a 4 core HP BL25p at 974 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx7620 at 1240 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx4640 at 1320 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core IBM p570 at 1313 SD users (AIX/DB2)

The per-core performance is irrelevant here!

Uh huh. You are of course familiar with software licensing I trust?
Just to refresh your memory, most software for UNIX is licensed on a
per-CPU basis. So a single niagara box costs you 8x what that BL25p
does...considering that software costs are annual and easily dwarf
hardware, I think Niagara might find the market limited to places where
the licensing is...palatable. Now, web serving is certainly one of
those, and app serving might be, but I don't think DBMSes are (unless
you want MySQL, which isn't that scalable).

Quote:

The whole point of Niagara
is to offer better overall performance when measured in terms of watts
or dollars. Considering that the T2000 is a single socket system I
think it does pretty well versus far more expensive and power hungry
Itanium and POWER systems, and makes a pretty fair showing in terms of
price/performance TCO (taking power & cooling into account and not just
initial price) when compared to x86.

Yea, and what about software? I'd love to see a TPC-C submission with
Oracle or DB2, 32P licenses don't grow on trees you know.

Quote:

I know the sellers of oxen want to portray Niagara as a chicken, but I
think it is more of a mule :)

How about a four headed chicken?

DK

Douglas Siebert
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 7:00 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

"David Kanter" <dkanter@gmail.com> writes:

Quote:

I think Niagara will certainly be interesting for a lot of server
stuff, web serving, collaboration/email and some java stuff seems
likely. Beyond that is...uncertain. Certainly, it's not the kind of
machine you'd use for SAP...

Bullshit. There's nothing wrong with Niagara itself in terms of SAP. SAP
doesn't require maximum possible single thread performance, make much if
any use of FP, nor does it max out memory bandwidth. OK, badly written
ABAP will, but badly written code will always be a problem with no solution.

Performance characterizations have shown that SAP tends to required
more CPU power than stuff like TPC-C. Now, Niagara appears to
perform...moderately well at SAP, but the problem is that you are still
talking about a proprietary platform. People are moving from Solaris
to Linux...not the other way around.

Oh, I don't doubt that. I think people would be stupid to use anything
other than Linux on x86 for SAP app servers today or for the last several
years. That's becoming true for a larger and larger swath of the server
space every day. Resistance is futile, commercial Unixes will no longer
be enhanced; it'll be maintenance-only mode only for HP-UX and AIX by 2012.

The point wasn't that people SHOULD BUY Niagara for SAP, just that it
can do SAP-type work just fine, and in fact can do the vast majority of
server tasks just fine. Just keep it far far away from HPC work!

Quote:

Well, SAP app servers essentially act like a farm of web servers, if one
goes down the transactions they were working on have to be restarted on
another, but the user only notices a few second hiccup if the client and
CI are configured correctly. So clustering and failover certainly aren't
needed, reliability is a requirement for app servers mainly because the
CIO gets so used to spending big on HA for every other component of a
large SAP install that trying to tell him he can relax his requirements
for the app servers isn't easy to explain to a non-technical guy. Plus
if it is sales and not technical people doing the specs you can guess
which side they quote on...

I didn't really look at the specs for the Niagara boxes but based on
their price I figured I should put in that disclaimer in case they did
something really dumb like not use ECC memory :)

Quote:

Power, space and cooling efficiency, at least if you assume the max power
per socket will be roughly equivalent and you'll get a comparable number
of sockets per U of rack space. Given that today's Niagara boards are
22(!) layer, they've obviously gone to a great deal of effort and cost
to optimize for board area!

Quote:

And that's a pretty big market, even if it
doesn't include 100% of the server space. Whether Sun chooses to target
Niagara on the high end reliability side of things is another matter, but
that lack has little to do with Niagara's design, merely its current
implementation.

Sun doesn't have much credibility in many areas with 'high end
reliability needs'. There are really only a couple of systems that
play in that area, and they are all from HP and IBM. However, Sun has
lots of credibility in the UNIX area...such as it is.

OK, sounds like you are talking about IBM mainframes and HP's VMS and/or
Tandem stuff. Fine, but in terms of Unix reliability Sun is considered
to be in pretty much the same class as HP and IBM. IBM's mainframe
heritage really helps elevate their Unix rep above what it really is with
the C-level guys who sign the big POs which I guess is what the accounting
term "goodwill" is all about...

--
Douglas Siebert dsiebert@excisethis.khamsin.net

Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute. Set him on fire, and
he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Robert Klute
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 8:07 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:14:00 -0500, Bill Todd <billtodd@metrocast.net>
wrote:

Quote:

Robert Klute wrote:
On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:51:34 +1100, Jason Ozolins
jason_abroad@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

Indeed. Apparently Niagara runs SAP benchmarks quite well:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmseer#big_sap_sd_2_tier

Which says that an 8 core / 32 thread SunFire T2000 achieved 950 SAP SD
users using Solaris/MaxDB. vs

a 4 core / 4 thread HP DL580 at 937 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
a 4 core / 4 thread HP rx4640 at 880 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core / 8 thread IBM p550 at 1000 SD users (Linux/DB2)

What the SUN blog didn't mention was
a 4 core HP BL25p at 974 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx7620 at 1240 SD users (Windows/SQL Server)
an 8 core HP rx4640 at 1320 SD users (HP-UX/Oracle)
a 4 core IBM p570 at 1313 SD users (AIX/DB2)

The main points, of course, being that

1. A single-socket Niagara box is far less expensive to purchase than
any of the configurations above, and

The configuration in the SAP benchmark is at least $27K on the web site.
A DL385, which has the same performance (for the SAP benchmark), is more
like $21K and the incrementanl cost on a BL25p similar to the one used
looks to be about $13K.

Quote:

2. A single-socket Niagara box uses far less power (and is thus far
less expensive to run - and cool) than any of the configurations above.

The BL and the DL look to pull about the same amps, if not less, than
the T2000. The T2000 looks fully loaded - 8 cores and 32G of memory.
The specs rate it at 2 amps (200-240V) and 1,365 BTU/hr. (Yes, I know
this is a conservative (read - over) estimate, but it is all I have to
go on). A DL385 with 2 CPUs (4 cores), 16G of memory, and 2 disks is
rated at 2amp/1363BTU and a 1 CPU (2 core) system is rated at
1.3amp/1027BTU.

Robert Klute
-----
The opinions are those of the poster, not the company. They probably
wouldn't want them anyway.

David Kanter
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 9:15 am Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Quote:

The point wasn't that people SHOULD BUY Niagara for SAP, just that it
can do SAP-type work just fine, and in fact can do the vast majority of
server tasks just fine. Just keep it far far away from HPC work!

I guess I don't really know what the vast majority of server tasks are.
I know that most 1-2S systems sell for web, file and print
serving...but Niagara is really overkill for all but the first.

Quote:

Now you are correct in terms of the machines they are selling that have
Niagara today, they are small and relatively inexpensive, and you need
higher reliability than they probably offer (certainly for the DB and CI)
It would probably work nicely for an app server, but I really don't see
any reason to use anything other than Linux on x86 for app servers these
days since price/performance rather than pure reliability tends to be more
important there.

I think the Niagara folks are probably smart enough to put in
reasonable amounts of RAS. If nothing else, you can get Xen for
Solaris and then do a cluster in a box with failover. It's not an
insoluble problem certainly.

Well, SAP app servers essentially act like a farm of web servers, if one
goes down the transactions they were working on have to be restarted on
another, but the user only notices a few second hiccup if the client and
CI are configured correctly. So clustering and failover certainly aren't
needed, reliability is a requirement for app servers mainly because the
CIO gets so used to spending big on HA for every other component of a
large SAP install that trying to tell him he can relax his requirements
for the app servers isn't easy to explain to a non-technical guy. Plus
if it is sales and not technical people doing the specs you can guess
which side they quote on...

I didn't really look at the specs for the Niagara boxes but based on
their price I figured I should put in that disclaimer in case they did
something really dumb like not use ECC memory :)

Hah, unlikely.

Quote:

Any servers running with high load averages where processes aren't being
preempted due to the timeslice expiring, where memory bandwidth is not
being maxed out or nearly so and which use little or no floating point
are going to have better per socket performance on Niagara than anything
else they can run on today.

You'll have to forgive me, but why should I care about per socket
performance?

Power, space and cooling efficiency, at least if you assume the max power
per socket will be roughly equivalent and you'll get a comparable number
of sockets per U of rack space. Given that today's Niagara boards are
22(!) layer, they've obviously gone to a great deal of effort and cost
to optimize for board area!

22 layers is an awful lot. Certainly not really suitable for x86-like
volumes. Perhaps Del can comment about how fucking expensive that will
be...

Anyway, I don't think you can assume that per socket power and space
are comparable. I understand the role of per thread or per CPU
performance, but per socket? That sounds to me like a marketing
department in desperate need of a crown...they should go to burger king
and get a happy meal.

You are trying to argue that per socket performance is a good proxy for
perf/watt and perf/space (space as in space consumed by said
server...). Why bother with a proxy when you can measure the real
thing?

IMHO, per socket performance is a marketing gimmick by Sun. If they
want to say they have the best perf/watt, that's cool. If they want to
say they have the best density, that's cool, but I think they lose to
IBM's pSeries stuff. I think they can get 8P in 2U...and those 8P pack
a lot more punch than Niagara.

Anyway, to the point of how well sockets and power and density
correlate, I don't think they do very well. For MPU families where you
are at the limit (IPF and x86 now) that might be true. However, if you
look at the server version of Yonah, they can probably get 4 sockets in
a single U and they positively sip energy. I have seen a fully loaded
2S/4P system using around 100W.

Quote:

Sun doesn't have much credibility in many areas with 'high end
reliability needs'. There are really only a couple of systems that
play in that area, and they are all from HP and IBM. However, Sun has
lots of credibility in the UNIX area...such as it is.

OK, sounds like you are talking about IBM mainframes and HP's VMS and/or
Tandem stuff. Fine, but in terms of Unix reliability Sun is considered
to be in pretty much the same class as HP and IBM.

Indeed, NSK, VMS, zOS and perhaps even OS/400 were what I was talking
about.

How sure are you of that claim RE: HPUX, AIX and Solaris? It seems to
me that Sun has always been strongest in the markets where reliability
wasn't quite as key...

Quote:

IBM's mainframe
heritage really helps elevate their Unix rep above what it really is with
the C-level guys who sign the big POs which I guess is what the accounting
term "goodwill" is all about...

I think you are wrong here, HA/CMP is descended from the mainframe IIRC
(Anne & Lynn...perhaps you could chime in here having worked on said
product). By now there might not be a big difference, but I think that
IBM's mainframe expertise certainly did help. However, I leave it up
to someone who can do more than theorize to settle that issue.

DK

Niels Jørgen Kruse
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 5:15 pm Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

David Kanter <dkanter@gmail.com> wrote:

Quote:

Yea, and what about software? I'd love to see a TPC-C submission with
Oracle or DB2, 32P licenses don't grow on trees you know.

Oracle licensing treats Niagara as a two-way.

--
Mvh./Regards, Niels Jørgen Kruse, Vanløse, Denmark

Matthias Wieser
Guest

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 5:15 pm Post subject: Re: Sun's Niagara is out

Patrick Schaaf wrote:

Quote:

Matthias Wieser <matthias-usenet@gmx.de> writes:

The real question is: Is there any serious server application which
does *not* use >32 processes or threads if under load?

No. The real question is: Is there any serious server application
deployment which does *not* have >32 processes/threads RUNNABLE,
most of the time.

It is irrelevant how many processes or threads there are, if they
are waiting for network or disk.

If they are most of the time waiting for network or disk, the CPU is not
the bottleneck anyway.

Quote:

BTW, the real real question is, given the fact that most serious
(web) servers already run on more than one physical server, spreading
the load: how many Niagara systems would I need to replace, for
example, the 20 commodity (HP DL360) systems that currently run web
server X?

Exactly!

--
Regards,

Matthias

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