Monday October 31, 2005

CMT is coming: Is your application ready?

We're close to seeing some of the most exciting SPARC systems in over a decade. The new Niagara based systems are the most aggressive CMT systems the industry has seen to date, with 32 threads in a single chip. A chip like this will be able to deliver the performance of up to 15 UltraSPARC processors while using less than one third of the power. This represents a compelling advantage not only in performance, but as a significant reduction power, cooling and space.

Since even a single Niagara chip presents itself to software as a 32-processor system, the ability of system and application software to exploit multiple processors or threads simultaneously is becoming more important than ever. As CMT hardware progresses, the software is required to scale accordingly to fully exploit the parallelism of the chip.

Current efforts are delivering successful scaling scaling results for key applications. Oracle, Sun Web Server, SAP are among many examples of applications which have already shown scalability which can fully exploit all the threads of a Niagara based system.

To maximize the success of CMT systems we need renewed focus on application scalability. Many of the applications we migrate to CMT systems will have been developed on low end Linux systems; they may have never been tested on a higher end system.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is running a special feature on the impact of CMT on software this month. There are several relevant articles in this issue:

• Kunle Olukotun, founder of Afara Websystems that pioneered what is now the Niagara processor, writes about the inevitable transition to CMT:

"the transition to CMPs is inevitable because past efforts to speed up processor architectures with techniques that do not modify the basic von Neumann computing model, such as pipelining and superscalar issue, are encountering hard limits. As a result, the microprocessor industry is leading the way to multicore architectures"

Throughput computing is the first and most pressing area where CMPs are having an impact. This is because they can improve power/performance results right out of the box, without any software changes, thanks to the large numbers of independent threads that are available in these already multithreaded applications."

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• Luiz Barroso, principal engineer at Google, shows why CMT is the only viable economic solution to large datacenter scale-out:

"We can break down the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a large-scale computing cluster into four main components: price of the hardware, power (recurring and initial data-center investment), recurring data-center operations costs, and cost of the software infrastructure.

...And it gets worse. If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin."

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• Richard McDougall, Performance and Availability Engineering on the fundamentals of software scaling:

"We need to consider the effects of the change in the degree of scaling on the way we architect applications, on which operating system we choose, and on the techniques we use to deploy applications - even at the low end."

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• Herb Sutter, Architect at Microsoft writes about changes to programming languages which could exploit parallelism:

"But concurrency is hard. Not only are today's languages and tools inadequate to transform applications into parallel programs, but also it is difficult to find parallelism in mainstream applications, and - worst of all - concurrency requires programmers to think in a way humans find difficult.

Nevertheless, multicore machines are the future, and we must figure out how to program them. The rest of this article delves into some of the reasons why it is hard, and some possible directions for solutions."

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In addition to the ACM queue articles, there was a recent NetTalk on Scaling My Apps, featuring Bryan Cantrill. There will be a followup experts exchange on this topic, where customers can live chat with the technical scaling experts. Also, look for a new whitepaper on scaling applications for CMT, from Denis Sheahan of the Niagara architecture group.

( Oct 31 2005, 09:39:46 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [11]