IBM & TPC-C - more hints at over-optimisation
Tuesday Feb 20, 2007
Another clue to IBM's over optimisation of TPC-C? Let's look historically. Since 2002, IBM has speed up SPECint_rate2000 by 6.1x times. Clearly this was due to newer systems, faster GHz, higher thread count, improved caches, and software improvements.
Funny At same time, IBM increased TPC-C by 10x times. Since these are the same systems there must be a lot more software work to get this kind of increase!
In 4-5 years the IBM TPC-C tuning outpaced the SPECint_rate2000 tuning by 64% ...and this is after 10 years after TPC-C was made public, so there before 2002 there must have been plenty of time to properly index and tune a database. Considering all of the compiler work on SPECint_rate2000 seems like IBM went to a lot of extra extra effort on TPC-C.
Somewhat funny, but looking at the post earlier today, it seems like things are lining up.
The math:
From the IBM p690 ca May 02 to the current IBM p595:
- SPECint_rate2000: 1513 / 249 = 6.1x
- TPC-C tpmC: 4033378 / 403255 = 10.0x
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10.0 / 6.1 = 1.64x -> 64%
Disclosure Statements
IBM p5 595 (Power5+ 2.3GHz 64p, 128thread) 4,033,378 tpmC, 2.97 US $/tpmC, Avail 01/22/07, IBM DB2 9, IBM AIX 5L V5.3, Microsoft COM+. As of May 21, 2002: IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo (1300 MHz, 32 CPU), 403,255.36 tpmC, $19.57/tpmC, available by November 22, 2002. Results as of 2/15/07, see http://www.tpc.org.
IBM System p5 595 (Power5+ 2.3GHz 64p, 128thread), 64 cores, 32 chips, 2 cores/chip (SMT on), 1513 SPECint_rate2000. IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo (1300 MHz, 32 CPU) 249 SPECint_rate2000. SPECint_rate2000. SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from http://www.spec.org as of 2/15/07.
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http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ibm_too_tricky_for_good
IBM did lots of optimizations to get high results that go way beyond what a DBA would do.
Posted by BM Seer on February 22, 2007 at 12:20 PM PST #