It's finally official you can read about it here, page 8 has Oracle's description of a processor for licensing calculations. So to summarize Oracle Enterprise license is $40000 or ($60000 with RAC) per processor.

When a chip has multiple cores the rules change

• UltraSparc T1 core factor .25
• AMD or Intel core factor .5
• Everthing else core factor .75

So an 8 core UltraSparc T1  8 * .25  = 2 oracle licenses = $80000
A dual Xeon server 2 * 1 = 2 oracle licenses = $80000

[ T: NiagaraCMT Solaris Oracle ]

NOP for technorati

I just got a Dr Dobbs Update email, The first article that caught my eye was Thoughts on Language Design by Guy Steele. In a nutshell a programming language dictate how we think about problems and how we solve them. Most programming today is built around the single thread of control with binary choices if-then-else etc.  The article raises some good ideas around rethinking this programming model.

My vote for a completely different model would be this.

I've been meaning to look at Ruby / Ruby on Rails for some time now, well ever since I heard there was a DTrace provider for it. After seeing that RoR version 1.0 had been released that made now a good time to take a look.

What is RoR 1.0

• Ruby 1.8.2 an interpreted language - a 3.6M tarball  compile yourself
  
• RubyGems 0.8.11 - ruby package manager (written in Ruby) - 160K tarball
• Rails - web application development framework  (written in Ruby picked up from http://www.rubyonrails.org and installed on your machine)

The default behavior of ruby and gem is to install the binaries, libs and man pages in /usr/local so you will need to have write permission there.

I followed the install instructions it all went very smoothly all the gnu tools required ship with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris in /usr/sfw/bin (make sure it's in your PATH)

Now it's time to see what RoR can do!

[ T: Ruby OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Why Does the Sun Fire T1000 use 180 Watts?
If you looked at computers in datacenters 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago the thing most cabinets had in common was one 30 Amp 220V power plug, from this we could see that each cabinet could draw 6600 Watts. So for years we had a simple relationship between the floor area and the power/cooling requirements of the datacenter. We could just roll cabinets in and out without having to worry about power or cooling. Around 5 years ago small 2 processor servers started entering the datacenter we could get 12 to 16 of these in a rack which was great but often power and cooling requirement per rack increased up to 20000 Watts, this is just too much for the typical datacenter so we end up putting servers in small piles giving us the lilliput server farm. So once power and cooling are factored in the TOC per server is high.

Designing a 1U server for server farms if we are constrained by the server room door 42RU (Rack Units) and one power socket 6600 Watts, add in power sequencers, smaller racks etc we may have only have 32RUs free giving a power range of 140 Watts to 200 Watts per RU. The T1000 comes in at 180 Watts putting it in the sweet spot of the power vs space trade off.

[ Technorati: NiagaraCMT ]

Oracle Embraces CoolThreads

I just saw this on yahoo

“customers using Oracle products with CPU-based licenses on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems will be able to count cores as .25 percent of a processor”

So your new Sun Fire T2000 with 8 cores, 4 threads per core giving 32 simultaneous processing threads only requires 2 Oracle CPU licences!

NiagaraCMT Solaris Oracle

Is A Sun Fire T2000 SMP (Symetric MultiProcessor) ?

I've seen this question asked a few times. This question is need to be broken down into 2 parts.

How many sockets does the T2000 have? - There is 1 socket for a UltraSPARC T1 processor .

The T1 processors contains 8 cores running 4 threads per core. Giving us 32 simultaneous processing threads on 1 die.

Symetric MultiProcessing describes the operating system feature of scheduling any task to any processing thread (Previous we would used CPU but the term CPU has become confused) it requires some underling hardware features cache coherency as an example to function efficently.

So the T2000 is a SMP computer but all of the SMP functions happen on 1 piece of silicon. This is a wow moment it! When you think of a T2000 as computer having 8 cores and the cache coherency and other SMP processes only takes a few cycles you see why it can outperform a multi-socket Xeon box .

NiagaraCMT Solaris

So what do you see when you first login to a Sun Fire T2000.

lets do a simple test

which sh

/usr/bin/sh

file /usr/bin/sh

/usr/bin/sh: ELF 32-bit MSB executable
SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped

Do the same thing on any SPARC solaris machine from Sun or others you will get the same result this means that an executable complied today or ten years ago will run! So even though the Sun T2000 is the biggest thing to hit the computer industry in ten years it has over 10 years worth of software out of the box. The next question is how will it scale. When you look here and here you can see that the T2000 scales very well.

So lets have a quick look around.

/usr/platform/sun4v/sbin/prtdiag
System Configuration:  Sun Microsystems  sun4v Sun Fire T200
System clock frequency: 200 MHz
Memory size: 32760 Megabytes

========================= CPUs ===============================================

                            CPU                 CPU
Location     CPU   Freq     Implementation      Mask
------------ ----- -------- ------------------- -----
MB/CMP0/P0       0 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P1       1 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P2       2 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P3       3 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P4       4 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P5       5 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P6       6 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P7       7 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P8       8 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P9       9 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P10     10 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P11     11 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P12     12 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P13     13 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P14     14 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P15     15 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P16     16 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P17     17 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P18     18 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P19     19 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P20     20 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P21     21 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P22     22 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P23     23 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P24     24 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P25     25 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P26     26 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P27     27 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P28     28 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P29     29 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P30     30 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P31     31 1200 MHz  SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1


========================= IO Configuration =========================

            IO
Location    Type  Slot Path                        Name                      Model
----------- ----- ---- --------------------------------------------- ------------------------- ---------
IOBD/NET0    PCIE IOBD                /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0    network-pciex8086,105e
IOBD/NET1    PCIE IOBD              /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1    network-pciex8086,105e
IOBD/PCIE0   PCIE    0          /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/fibre-channel@0fibre-channel-pciex1077,2432
IOBD/PCIE0   PCIE    0        /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/fibre-channel@0,1fibre-channel-pciex1077,2432
IOBD/PCIE-1  PCIE IOBD                /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/isa                       isa
IOBD/PCIE-1  PCIE IOBD              /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@5       usb-pciclass,0c0310
IOBD/PCIE-1  PCIE IOBD              /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@6       usb-pciclass,0c0310
IOBD/PCIE-1  PCIE IOBD                /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/ide          ide-pci10b9,5229
IOBD/PCIE-1  PCIE IOBD   /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2   LSILogic,sas-pci1000,50  LSI,1064
IOBD/PCIX1   PCIX    1                /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0    network-pciex8086,105e
IOBD/PCIX1   PCIX    1              /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1    network-pciex8086,105e

The first thing to note is this Sun Fire T2000 has 32G of memory. The next thing is wow 32 processors and four gigabyte ethernet ports.

This reminds Me of the first time I logged into an Enterprise 10000 (E10K) in 1997, from memory it was half loaded with 32 UltraSPARC II and 32G of memory. The E10K was a bit bigger than a large refrigerator. Now we have a similar system but only requiring 2U of rack space. Back then the first question was how are we going to use all that processing power.

We had a few large applications that needed that much processing power and back then we needed to do some databases, web servers tuning to get them to scale with 32 CPU, Today after 8 years all these applications have defaults that make them run well on Sun Fire E25K where we can have over 140 cores. So to most solaris applications a 32 “CPU” machine is mid sized – no tuning necessary.

Another great thing about the E10K was you could partition them on the fly the unit of granularity was 4 CPUs so you could have up to 16 OS running in one E10K chassis, people loved this feature and that drove Sun to develop a rich resource management framework. In Solaris 10 you can now have psrset, containers and zones and other resource management tools so if you currently have a whole rack of lightly loaded systems they can keep their IP addresses and resource QOS and move onto one T2000.

So as the E10K was years ahead of the competition in the late 90s the T2000 is years ahead of the competition Today.

NiagaraCMT Solaris