BLOG on IT/IS in Healthcare & Life Sciences Joerg Schwarz on Healthcare [Health + Care]

Yesterday we announced in New York a new generation of CMT servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and 5240.
There are a number of Blogs on blogs.sun.com where you can learn more about some of the technical aspects of the systems, for example on how you can use an onboard chip to get 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or the fact that even this chip is open source, as strange as that sounds. A good overview to blogs on technical details and performance results is in Alan Packer's weblog.

The performance of these systems is stellar for web services and all kinds of other applications, especially databases. How can we use this in the context of health care IT?

First of all, many of the information systems we build in health care today use a SOA framework to exchange messages and data between different application, both intra- and extra organizational. Many of these transactions require access to a number of web services. Authentication a user against an enterprise wide LDAP directory, for example, is a web service. The LDAP server receives many authentication requests. Each of these requests is a short message that requires a simple lookup (in the form of if username == true, lookup passwd=$1, role=$2). Applications like this are ideal for CMT. In a regular architecture, the lookup would blog a thread, and if it is a single threaded CPU, thus an entire CPU, for as long as it takes to access a database, issue a SQL query, wait for the result, and deliver the result back to the requesting program to fill the variables. In the pseudo code example, we could actually parse two independent threads, one looking up the password to compare the input password with the password associated with the  user, and a second thread for looking up the role, for example in order to apply role based access permissions. A Sun Sparc CMT plus chip can handle 128 such threads in parallel - compared to an Intel core duo which can handle two threads in parallel (and a quadcore four threads).

Now you might think "but the Intel core duo is faster because of the higher clock rate". True. But how long do you think it takes to parse a single lookup command? Very, very little time. Most of the time, the thread will be sitting there, waiting for the lookup target, such as an mySQL RDBMS server, to deliver the result back. The return time is dependent on the network, the capacity and the performance of the lookup target. My point is that webservices performance depends to a large extend on externalities from a CPU's point of view. Scaling web services with traditional single threaded cores means adding more cores per socket (therefore quadcores, for example), adding more sockets per motherboard, usually two per one rack unit, and more servers per rack - for 128 threads you therefore need either 8 quadcore dual socket servers, or just a single Sun SPARC CMT plus server. Now you know what it means when we talk about saving space (a minimum of 7 rack units) and power (due to power leakage, 8 power supplies waste a lot more power than one power supply). For a small web service infrastructure, the difference might not be noticable in the bottom line, but for hospitals with many applications and users, providing web services with Sun SPARC CMT can impact power and cooling cost significantly.

A 128 way computer with a single chip and really good memory and I/O performance is of course also an ideal virtualization platform. Using Solaris' advanced features for containers, the system can be partitioned dynamically into virtual servers, for example an array of threads for application server, web server and database server, essentially build an entire datacenter within a single rack unit server. The cool thing is that communication between the containers can use the internal bus, saving network bandwidth while improving performance.

While this is not a comprehensive overview of all the things you could do with a Sun SPARC CMT plus system, it hopefully gives you some ideas how to deploy such a platform in health care. Let me give you one more practical example: instead of using a farm of tens or hundreds of  of Citrix servers to deliver Windows desktops to clients throughout the hospital or office space, you could use a small array of Sun SPARC CMT plus servers to virtualize Windows sessions and deliver them to Sun Ray thin clients. Denver Health, for example, can run over one hundred sessions on a single T2000, a predecessor of the new T5120 and T5140.

If you want to try what Sun SPARC CMT plus can do for your organization, give it a try. We have a great try and buy program that allows you to order a system and test it. If you like it, you keep it, if not, you return it - as simple as that. If you actually want to buy it, you can get a great discount of up to 45% - the try and by program web page provides all the necessary information.

Developers and ISVs can also contact me and we can provide assistance in tuning, optimizing and benchmarking your application, just like we did with Tolven.