You can always count on Rave to be your trusted advisor for the latest in technology trends, tips, and tools. Each quarter, we'll give you bits and bytes of useful information including new product notes, drivers/patches, troubleshooting tips, solutions for software issues and more.
This quarter's first tip takes a look at CPU types. As you can see in the graphic below, the lion's share of market share of CPU's goes to the Intel/AMD i386/X64 series of processors. You might ask yourself why does CPU selection make a difference? Why not just select the latest X64 capable CPU and select the features you need in a server? It is quite easy to go with the flow and select an X64 CPU. However, there is a value with not "following the crowd" so to speak. For the most part, the price/performance metric clearly goes with X64. You can simply crunch larger datasets more quickly and cheaper with an X64 CPU. In some cases though, an alternate CPU architecture can make sense.
Let's take for example Sun's SPARC architecture. The UltraSparc T2 Niagara CPU has the capability to execute many "light weight process" threads simultaneously, more so than a typical X64 CPU. There are advantages to this capability. A busy web server can process more transactions per second with an up to 128 threads / 64GB memory in a redundant 1U chassis. The UltraSparc T2+ is targeted on server workloads with high throughput requirements via low frequency core design and massive chip multithreading capabilities. The Sun UltraSparc T2 was designed as a scalable solution for fast growing datacenter applications, its main target being emerging web- and database markets. Sun Microsystems presents the 8-core, 64-thread second generation Niagara SPARC, doubling the number of threads from the previous design. The chip integrates 4MB L2 cache, one x8 PCI-express, two 10G Ethernet ports, and 8 FBDIMM ports.
Conclusion:
While the market bends to pure price/performance metrics, there are still situations where swimming against the flow can reap benefits if you keep looking "outside of the box."
Niagara2 (one x 1.4GHz chip) SPECint_rate2006 78.3 SPECfp_rate2006 61.5
Power6 (one x 4.7GHz) SPECint_rate2006 60.90 SPECfp_rate2006 58.0
Itanium2 9050 (two x 1.6GHz) SPECint_rate2006 N/A SPECfp_rate2006 58.1
Xeon X5355 (two x 2.66GHz) SPECint_rate2006 60.50 SPECfp_rate2006 60.9
Opteron 2222 SE (two x 3GHz) SPECint_rate2006 60.40 SPECfp_rate2006 52.5
Ref. http://www.springerlink.com/content/v65k861757532p83/fulltext.pdf?page=1
Ref. http://www.spec.org/
This issue's second tip provides an example of a useful shell loop. This particular loop prints out the temperature for a SPARC system running Solaris.
while true # alias for ":" As you can see below, we are well with in the operating limits for this workstation.
# prtpicl -v|/usr/sfw/bin/ggrep -B 8 Temp
do
echo snapshot
prtpicl -v|/usr/sfw/bin/ggrep -B 8 core|grep Temp
#prtpicl -v|/usr/sfw/bin/ggrep -B 4 cpu|grep Temp
sleep 5
# control-c should exit the loop
done
# send the output of this to "tee", preferrably /export/home/
# i.e. ./temp-show.sh|tee /export/home/
Here is an example of the output:
# ./temp*
snapshot
:Temperature 42
:Temperature 71
:Temperature 72
:Temperature 48
:Temperature 47
:Temperature 26
:Temperature 40
snapshot
:Temperature 42
:Temperature 71
:Temperature 72
:Temperature 48
:Temperature 47
:Temperature 26
:Temperature 40
hard-disk0 (temperature-sensor, b90000093f)
:_fru_parent (b900000a3fH)
:ID 0
:Label hard-disk0
:HighShutdownThreshold 60
:HighWarningThreshold 55
:LowWarningThreshold 5
:LowShutdownThreshold 0
:Temperature 42
--
:ID 0
:Label Die
:HighPowerOffThreshold 105
:HighShutdownThreshold 100
:HighWarningThreshold 95
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -10
:LowPowerOffThreshold -20
:Temperature 71
--
:ID 1
:Label Die
:HighPowerOffThreshold 105
:HighShutdownThreshold 100
:HighWarningThreshold 95
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -10
:LowPowerOffThreshold -20
:Temperature 72
--
:ID 5
:Label Ambient
:HighPowerOffThreshold 80
:HighShutdownThreshold 75
:HighWarningThreshold 70
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -8
:LowPowerOffThreshold -16
:Temperature 48
--
:ID 3
:Label Ambient
:HighPowerOffThreshold 80
:HighShutdownThreshold 75
:HighWarningThreshold 70
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -10
:LowPowerOffThreshold -18
:Temperature 47
--
:ID 2
:Label Ambient
:HighPowerOffThreshold 80
:HighShutdownThreshold 70
:HighWarningThreshold 45
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -11
:LowPowerOffThreshold -19
:Temperature 26
--
:ID 4
:Label Ambient
:HighPowerOffThreshold 80
:HighShutdownThreshold 75
:HighWarningThreshold 70
:LowWarningThreshold 0
:LowShutdownThreshold -9
:LowPowerOffThreshold -17
:Temperature 40