Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Tuesday July 11, 2006

Three New Opteron Servers from Sun
Big Announcement(s) from Sun today.
Sun introduces the next generation of technology servers today based on three primary guiding principles:

Innovation matters and is a key differentiator
HPC market is a leading indicator
Power: Cooling and efficiency are primary concerns

In true Contrary fashion, Sun has introduced three new systems will change the game (we hope, in our favor):

Sun Fire X4600 Server: The industry's first 16-way x64 server in a single 4U chassis.
Sun Fire X4500 Server: The world's first hybrid data server -- a combination of a 4-way x64 server with 24TB of data storage starting as low as $2/GB.
Sun Blade 8000 Modular System: The world's first no compromise blade platform -- a breakthrough modular architecture that delivers the performance, price, and flexibility of rackmount servers with the serviceability and efficiency of blades.

These systems all run Solaris, various flavors of Linux and Microsoft Windows. If you couldnt listen to the announcement earlier, you can view the keynote and announcement here.

So, why am I excited? On the Sun Studio compiler side, here is where the compiler drove performance metrics on these:

The fastest system on the planet for floating point calculations with a SPEC CPU2000 FP score of 3538
World Record 8-thread performance on SPEC OMPM2001 HPC benchmark of 20319
The fastest x86 system on floating point throughput benchmark with a SPEC CPU2000 FPrate score of 231

We set these new benchmark records on all three of these systems. Whats more is that we trump everyone in terms of SPEC CPU2000 FP with a score of 3538, beating out not just Woodcrest's impressive numbers, but also IBM Power5+ systems.

But beyond the parochial pride and joy of achieving (and beating) World Records, this is the first time since the late 80s that I have seen such impressively and elegantly simple, plug-and-play, extensible systems from Sun. To be fair, I have been in many presentations where Andy Bechtolsheim has rolled out one or more of these systems to show to customers, but I couldnt blog about it until now, though there were plenty of rumors floating about their existence(like this article in The Register).

Over the next few days or weeks, I'd like to discuss various aspects of the new offerings from Sun from my (humble?) perspective. I hope you'll join me in the discussion, because I'm truly impressed by these offerings and I dearly hope that they will define the next successful phase for Sun.
Posted by tatkar ( Jul 11 2006, 02:11:10 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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