Friday Oct 12, 2007

The Niagara 2 chip

Here's a view of the chip that beats at the heart of every T5120/T5220. I created this illustration soon after "tapeout" (that's basically the event the data is sent for fabrication after the design of the chip has finished). It went into a variety of presentations like the one given at the Hot Chips conference in 2007.

The eight cores (SPC) in the middle of the chip are interconnected through the crossbar (CCX). Each core includes its own floating point unit and crypto unit. The blocks for the 4MB level 2 data cache (L2D) are placed near the left and right edges of the chip. Near the lower right corner is the network interface (RDP, TDS, RTX, MAC), supporting two 10Gb Ethernet ports. The four FB-DIMM memory controllers (MCU) are located near the left and right input/output interfaces (FSR and PSR). Near the lower left corner is the PCI-E port (PEU).

Posted on: Oct 12, 2007

Posted by: Stephan Hörold

Category: Personal

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Wednesday Oct 10, 2007

Experimenting with the T5120

What really caught my attention recently was this:


Photo courtesy Oliver Fuckner

What would a test system be good for if you couldn't do some real testing?!

The engineer at STRATO decided to experiment with an iRAM that he connected to one of the internally available SAS connectors. The iRAM is essentially a DDR-based storage device that mimics a SATA harddrive. The idea was to support random IO (typical for mailspool) with an ultra-fast disk.

The description and this picture quickly made its rounds via email and even some VPs were eager to add various technical comments. Now, that was an interesting email thread to watch.

Posted on: Oct 10, 2007

Posted by: Stephan Hörold

Category: Personal

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Putting the T5120 to the test

One of our first T5120 systems for testing was sent to Strato, one of the largest web hosts in Europe. Without much ado, the systems engineer put it to good use as an http server for static and dynamic content and compared it to a T2000. The new server immediately performed almost twice as fast as the T2000.

In another test, the T5120 was added to an existing load balancer group with four T2000 systems. The test system was configured to balance three times as much load as a single T2000. So the balancing was basically distributed among 7 units where the T5120 alone supported almost half (3/7) of all the load balancing activity. At that configuration, the T5120 was still running 50% idle during peak internet traffic.

All in all, Strato appears to be really happy with the new T5120. According to the system engineer, upgrading from a T2000 was really easy as the new T5120 virtually behaves the same, just faster. Besides, if you've installed an X4200 before, you are already familiar with the service processor and you should be able to start your installation immediately. Apart from upgrading to Solaris 10 U4, nothing else was necessary to kick start the system provided by the Early Access team.

Here's a summary in the customer's own words:
As Europe's second largest web host, we are always interested in testing new solutions that enable us to deliver the highest levels of service to our customers, at the lowest cost. We were one of Sun's first customers of the Sun Fire T2000 server and were delighted that this system enabled us to dramatically reduce power by over 70% and space by almost 60% in our data centers.

The new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5x20 servers will enable us to significantly extend our ability to scale quickly and efficiently, while further reducing costs. We estimate that the T5000 servers will deliver around 2.5x higher throughput than the existing T2000 servers when running our Apache web servers and mail servers, which has been proven in our testing. In terms of computing power, the T5000 offers a performance per watt ratio that is nearly doubled in a direct comparison to its predecessor the T2000. In other words, with the new line of Sun CMT-based servers, we will be able to save 43% of energy consumption compared to a direct replacement strategy of our existing T2000 servers. At the same time, we will use the extended functionality of the T5000 servers to run our floating point-intensive SPAM filters, and encrypt our SMTP traffic, ensuring higher levels of security for our customers These servers will enable us to meet our key objectives of efficiently scaling for the opportunities presented by the Participation Age. René Wienholtz, CTO, Strato AG

Posted on: Oct 10, 2007

Posted by: Stephan Hörold

Category: Personal

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Tuesday Oct 09, 2007

A customer turns on the first T5120

A while ago the Early Access team sent a T5120 to a customer. It was the first Niagara 2 based system ever delivered outside Sun for someone to play with.

In the Early Access team we are all engineers and you can probably imagine how it feels to experiment with a new toy that hardly anyone else has seen yet. It's like sending a kid to the candy store. When the system arrived at the customer site, the system engineer called to let us know that he was about to pick up the box in the lobby. My task was to monitor the setup of the T5120 and to take notes, so I stayed on the phone and listened to the live action. He unpacked the box and plugged in the power cord but when he connected his laptop to the service processor of the T5120 to get it fired up, the system wouldn't respond.

Uh-oh. What to do now?

I thought about all the debate that would now ensue to try to wake up the system. But instead the system engineer's instinctive reaction was to grab a different Ethernet cable and plug it in. Et voilà! The service processor responded to his inputs.

That was the only surprise and soon after going through the boot process, the T5120 showed all 64 threads were alive. The system was ready to be loaded with applications for testing.

Great! That's all the Early Access team wanted. We were ready to ship boxes to more customers.

Posted on: Oct 09, 2007

Posted by: Stephan Hörold

Category: Personal

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This blog copyright 2007 by Stephan Hörold