Performance Power and Lifestyles

A number of years ago we evolved our performance QA model at Sun to
better support development and testing of high performance software and
hardware. We put big rules in place "If Solaris is slower is a bug" Then
added developed a process to keep our competitive comparisons up to date.

We call this Suns' Performance Lifestyle. See
http://blogs.sun.com/fintanr/entry/suns_performance_lifestyle_buzzword_bingo

The buzz was around price performance but now the meaning of price has
changed. Total Cost of ownership includes cost of powering and cooling
our systems so Suns' Performance QA process has changed.

The first major effort by the industry performance community is SPECpower.
This is a start but like many benchmarks it is open to abuse. In short power
usage like performance depends on your application, your system load,
your configuration etc. Many of the of the more popular benchmarks
are adding a power metric but this takes time.

To support the many teams in Sun that are working on performance and
power management features we're extended power monitoring while
benchmarking to a all the benchmarks. Every Solaris & BIOS
and SPARC firmware change will be measure for its effect on power
consumption. Is this the Green Lifestyle ? Power lifestyle ?
Utility Bill lifestyle ;) ?

Posted at 10:59AM Aug 08, 2008 by damienf in Solaris  |