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Looking at UltraSPARC III
argonaut writes, "I saw a cool article about the UltraSPARC 3 at Ace's Hardware. They have some of the usual intro stuff about Sun in the beginning, but then get more in depth about the technical specs. The best part is the second page where they talk about ILP, pipelining, and scalability (up to 1000 cpus!). There are some excellent examples of ILP and load latency. "
I knew if I took the time to read the article before posting, there'd be a dozen or two replies, but I figured I'd throw in the troll first and then say anything useful later.
The fact that it _was_ designed for multiple-processor applications was hinted in the abstract, but Beowulf isn't how you use that - though for vanilla applications it may still be simpler to Beowulf a bunch of single-CPU machines than design a new motherboard.
This does not measure L1 latency. You are measuring throughput of the processor.
At full saturation at 539Mhz the L1 data transfer rate would be 4112 MB/s. Your about 2/3's there.
What I meant by power budget was that the die (hence power) would more than double if the architects decided to go 1 cycle latency for the L1
How much I/O bandwidth does a PC have? Approximately 800Megabytes per second.
How much I/O bandwidth does a SUN server have? About 3.2Gigabytes per second on the low end.
You get what you pay for. Sure, Sun boxes ARE overpriced if all you want to do is serve web-pages, but Sun charges what the market will bear because the "market" is not penniless Linux geeks (no offense to penniless Linux geeks).
Sun will close the price gap as soon as Intel-based hardware closes the performance gap. Don't hold yer breath. Sad but true.
I was being sarcastic
What enterprise information/data processing system are you running on Linux? Where can I find a 32/64/128 processor machine running Linux? (trick question, some bright individuals have booted Linux ON A SUN E10K, dunno about the Origin2000)
BTW what Sun has is BINARY compatibility. Develop on an Ultra5 and put it into production on a E10k.
I thought I'd NEVER EVER NOT IN A MILLION YEARS hear a Linux geek sing the praises of an IBM mainframe!!!!
News for nerds, stuff that reincarnates.
Sorry to burst yer bubble, kid. EDA is just NOT being done on Linux around here (yet).
PS I work at Enterprise Server Group in Beaverton, Oregon.
Quite a few E10K's are built here in Beaverton, Oregon. They have an old Cray in the lobby. The technology used in Starfire was not from SGI, it was from Floating Point Systems, which Sun got from SGI when they bought Cray and decided they didnt' want FPS (dumb, huh).
oh my! what have I done!? What horror have I unleashed?
Uh, not from SGI. A few years back, when the computing section of Cray split, SGI purchased on half and Sun got the other. The results were the Enterprise line for sun (using the Gigaplane) and the Origin series for SGI.
Try taking a measly low-end 486 or 386 from 5-6 years ago and running the same version of NT on it for people to use with the same disk and memory that they used with win 3.1 or whatever back then.
I haven't bothered with 386s or 486s, but I have a 4-5 year old PMac 7200 (w/120MHz PPC 601 processor) running MacOS 8.6 (it was running LinuxPPC until I gave it to my sister a year ago), Office 98, Netscape 4.6, Photoshop 5, etc.. It crunches F77 code at almost twice the speed as the 100MHz Sparc5 in the office next door, and the real kicker is it's ability to use more than 256 colors...
Be careful, I've found that for some applications (i.e. fortran based Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD, codes) an FPU anemic Mac G3 300 (with the F77 routine absorbing most of the cpu cycles) is roughly equivilent to an UltraSparc30 with a 300MHz UltraSparc II processor. Keep in mind that the US30 was running, solaris, a multi-tasking and multi-user OS (note: only one user was logged in and no other cpu intensive processes were running) which may actually reduce the performance when compared with the MacOS which hands the almost entire CPU over to a single app.
The MacOS has its worts, but I can pick up a G3/500MHz/512MB RAM/40Gb HD for $2000 (a G4 would be nice but Absoft doesn't have the Altivec portion of its compiler quite ready to go) and set it in the corner to crunch numbers just as fast as it can. Performance/speed is context dependent.. A solaris or linux box has a lot of capabilites that a MacOS box lacks, but there are times when those capabilities degrade the machines ability meet the user's needs..
Is Sun going to ship the next generation of UltraSparc boxes with a poptart (Mmmm poptarts...) slot? Or maybe they could use the cpu to heat a small section of the case so hungary slashdotters could warm up their dilburritos..
While Sun does use SCI for parallel clusters, Sun's NUMA-like designs do not use SCI. SCI sucks for NUMA. Look at how badly Sequent and Convex/HP V2500 scale. SCI is simply not good enough for NUMA.
At least we know now who the goatse.cx guy is.
Forgotten to logout or tick "Post Anonymously", he?
I'm using TCP/IP.
Apple hasn't persued the same strategy -- they've never built a real server machine (with the exception of some long forgotton AIX boxes), and their 'datacenter' marketshare reflects this.
You could argue that Apple is a significant player in the high-end workstation market. Not for engineering applications, but for graphic and video apps. At least from Apple's point of view, they are still making tons of money from loaded G4s with SCSI and lots of memory.
Solaris 8 is free for both commercial and non-commercial use.
http://www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris/
And a U80 (which is like a smaller 450) that's 4way with 4Gig is probably even less.
This hardware site has some detailed, no-nonsense technical articles about CPUs too.
Why can't He use both? It would take Jesus to bring peace between the two camps, after all...
Suns are quite reliable, but definately not the most reliable machines out there - they are not even designed to be the most reliable machines. Check out the Tandem section at www.compaq.com, they're old, they're ugly, but they will give you an idea of what reliable is.
Well you would need 10,000 Ultra Sparcs to get any decent performance. Long live the Alpha EV6.7!
1 4583_2%21ob%7E24001_1_1,00.html
http://www.compaq.com/pressrelease/0,1494,wp%7E
(shame that AlphaServers have such limited expandability - you can only have up to 14 CPUs on their biggest box)
The O2k and Onyx2 didn't come from Cray; they were in development at Mountain View for quite some time before the acquisition. SGI marketing drivel aside (terms like CrayLink, product bundlings that made a <128p system an "SGI," >=128p "Cray", &c.), credit for that design rests pretty squarely in Building 7.
Who's first? Cisco? Dell? Intel? Amazon? Ebay?
no, we only run on 32 way 8 gig 450mhz xeon intel boxes. it can be done, and it works well.
Ahh not really. Solaris will scale to 1024 CPU's. NCR is using Solaris on its large systems. Give me a break, you have most likely never even seen a 14 way system. -dej at hcetgw. moc
You must be foolish. Sun is what you buy when you want to reboot every 18 months, not upgrade. I have personally nursed two INP's from 1981, and did not need to upgrade the drives until 1998. This was an ad production server.
You can hot-swap CPU/Memory but the system powers down when you open the case? How does this work?
:-)
Sorry I'm so ignorant, not everybody plays around with enterprise servers
I doubt that. He'd probably just get nailed to the cross again. :)
I don't know who moderated this up, but you are in severe need of a beating with the clue stick. It's not even remotely funny.
Because you never stop paying for them!
Didn't think so.
Maybe you should try working with Sun hardware before you say it's worthless. Your assertion that linux and intel can do everything solaris and sun can proves that you don't know what solaris and sun can do.
FLAME ON!
x86 sucks shit man. Worthless garbage, only good for playing games. Period. Linux is OK. Solaris rocks. Ultimate hacker OS (if you could pry me from OpenBSD :-).
5. With solaris/sparc. You never have to worry about hardware support. The OS will find it, detect, configure it.. I laugh at you all Linux zealots saying Linux is easy to install. Try to install Solaris on an UltraSparc, you will see what I am talking about
why don't you try to install a PCI TNT graphic card in UltraSparc? let's see how the solaris auto-detect the device.. what? it's not supported? I guess easy installation process won't do you any good if it doesn't support the devices you want to use.
Whichever Jesus uses, we all know what Satan uses: MS Word. (He's a M$ employee, after all!)
You should visit www.sunfreeware.com .
It's too bad there's no moderation cagegory "just plain dumb"
People who do real work. Running x86 in a production environment is laughable for any self respecting system admin. Yes Toto, we are not in Kansas any more.
MOOOOT!!!!
Hey, you're right!
MOOOOT!!!!
A 4-way Sun E450 is about $6K less than a Compaq 4-way Prolinea 7000 Wintel box.
Yes SGI has big systems. The O2K is at 256 CPUs with 512P in beta. The max theoretical limit of the architecture is 2048P. Blue Mountain is a cluster of 256-way boxes.
gcc throwing a signal 11 in a way that is intermittant and not reliably reproducable may be a sign of faulty RAM.
:)
Of course, that little tidbit is all over the place, so I can only assume that your problem is different. Never mind. Carry on. Have a nice day.
The CPUs are overpriced. The motherboards are overpriced. The memory is overpriced. The funky how-swap PCI cards are overpriced. The OS is waaay overpriced. What's a sun do that Lintel cannot? Even a farm of Lintel boxes can be had for less than that sun.
Ascii Blue Mountain has 6144cpus! SGI's been doing this for a while...and better/cheaper :). Where do you think Sun bought the e10k technology from...wonders what marketing can do...Sun==M$ :-). http://www.top500.org/lists/TOP500List.php3?Y=1999 &M=11
Yeah, guess I should have given more info... but this was on a production machine. These was a live box, running sendmail, qpopper & Merit AAA doing all of this. The box itself was bound by not having enough spindles to keep data moving off of it. This was doing actual work, 500 or so processes of sendmail running at all time, spawning, doing it's work, and dieing off faster than you could really count. That's doing real work... where your's is pretty much not doing anything... hell if you felt like it you could probably get a box up to 100k ctx switches and overflow the integer value for load by doing a little cheating to run up the numbers like you are :) But she was impressed that this little 2 proc O200 had been up for over a year was taking a load like this.
:)
The box was seriously limited on perks: 256mb ram, 3 drives, 1 nic, doing all mail and authentication for ~23k users (and yes I was a bastard on mail quotas). I finally I got fed up with the place after the upgrades to that box hadn't gone through even though the budget had been approved for 2 years actually is was no hardware or software upgrades at all for 2 years, even though all the money was approved (tell me that wouldn't tick a person off)
Also to get back on topic Irix still scales to 512 proc's today where Solaris hits the wall at 64
Beyond that, you have to go NUMA.
Sun stuff is pretty darned reliable, but the most reliable commercial (proprietary *nix) out there that is still within the realm of affordability (for businesses, not necessarily for the average joe individual) is the RS6000/AIX platform from IBM. I'm a seasoned unix old fossil who's worked extensively with Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, SGI and multitudes of x86 platforms, and the hardest one to make crash is an RS6000 running 4.3.2 AIX. My second favorite for stability is Sun (real UltraSPARC hardware, not that Ultra-5 or Ultra-10 PC thingy) running Solaris 2.6 or 7.
I'm not sure what you mean about Sun not supporting hot swap pci, but I have worked on Compaq Prolinats that support hot-swapping a video cards and NICs under NT, and I know that some IBM x86 Netfinity servers support hot swap PCI as well. Not that I was ever brave enough to attempt hot-swapping a card......
Solaris currently supports 64-way systems it's expected they will support 100-way by the end of '00. I think everyone is pretty far off from supporting 1000-way. Just because the CPU arch can do it doesn't mean it's gonna happen (anytime soon) :) SGI recently announced 32-way linux and is working on 128-way linux. that's gonna be cool. just wish i had the cash for a huge machine like that. nate (aphro@aphroland.org)
(P!!!/K7 - 3 cycles, K6 - 2 cycles)
Yes, memory access is in the hundreds of cycles if you consider that the request must filter through the L1 and L2 caches, and the processor must send out the actual request which might be stuck behind another set of requests from another cache miss. I don't think that the P6 core is smart enough to re-order bus transactions. I know that the K7 is.
SunOS 4 and Open/NetBSD run much better on SPARC, especially sun4c. Netscape 3 is fairly quick and usable on an IPC with 16MB of RAM and SunOS 4.1.3. I'm just sick of the same old shit. The "run linux everywhere" mentality is really starting to make people turn away from it.
Dear Child,
You have a definite lack of knowledge. BSD is every bit as good as GNU/Linux. BSD is based on mature code. Your knowledge of GNU/Linux can be used in BSD, so don't fear, your time is not wasted.
Of course I use OpenBSD, and I am proud of it.
Just a reality check for everyone..
er... I meant to post that anonymously... so pretend you didn't see my name...
crap, I did it again.
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
"Wow! You got Sun to give you free copies of Solaris for Sparc? Last I checked you still had to pay a hefty $90k (!) for an OS with nearly equivalent functionality as Linux. I call that a bad deal." Solaris for sparc and x86 is free, its $20 for shipping and media. So whats linux have that Solaris doesn't?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They spent millions of dollars on R&D and testing to get code that performs well, what gives you the right to take and distribute it freely? You gain the code but what does Sun gain? Nothing. Thats where money comes into play, they will gladly give you the code for a price and both sides benefit.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm still using a IPX. How things have changed.
I fail to see how 1000 CPUs is of any advantage. A few maybe (up to 8 or so). Go overboard and they'll burn cycles just waiting for access to memory, etc. And if your task is modular enough to keep CPUs and their memory mostly sepaated, then why not go with some sort of clustering of cheaper machines (Beowulf)? Besides, I'm sure you could get much more than 1000 machines for the price of a single 1000-CPU machine.
Take a look.
You say in one post that Jesus uses vi, now you say that you use emacs. Which is it?
You might be the way, the truth, and the light, but you damn sure don't know what editor you use. Somebody should nail you to a... oh wait, never mind.
Well, whether anyone cares is another matter, but it almost certainly will be an option. Linux already runs on everything up to an E6500 (known) and theoretically supports the E10k (nobdy's ever gotten hardware to test on though). I would certainly consider running Linux on US3-based systems. Up to about 8 cpus it beats the shit out of solaris. Past there people assume it would lose, but it's hard to know for sure as the most we've ever seen tested is 14. (shrug) Maybe nobody talks about running linux on these things, but certainly it's possible.
You may have a broken cpu or mobo. I actually have this behaviour on one of my systems. Put one cpu in. Works fine. Put second cpu in. Breaks. Remove first cpu. Still broken. Switch second cpu to known-good first slot. Still broken. Thus we conclude that the second cpu is bad. Since cpus these days have cache on board, it's entirely possible that the cpu itself is fine but the cache is bad. This seems reasonable, since cache is still memory and bad memory is the known cause of random sig11s. HTH.
There were no 100 MHz microsparc[-ii] or turbosparc cpus. 110 perhaps? Also, AFAIK there is no possible way to put 164MB in a SS5. (64+64+32+4??? There were no 4MB modules...) I know I'm nitpicking, but... Now, getting rid of CDE, there's an idea I think we can all agree on. :)
I'd also note that I work for a LARGE isp, and a certain Microsoft partner that I can't name uses all Microsoft / Compaq computers for the front end web servers and Sun E450's for the Oracle Database backend.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Of course, if they want to change my mind, they could always deliver one of these to me, with, oh, a gig or two of RAM, a SCSI RAID array and a 21" monitor. A decent T1 connection would be nice, too. That might convince me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They use an SCI network to access memory. Think of it as a beowulf system with 1000 individual workstations networked together with an amazingly fast network (Dolphin interconnect's SCI). The operating system handles making the 1000 workstations look like a single box. I'm sure Linux could be hacked to work in the same way.
BTW, Dolphin do SCI for Linux if anyone's interested.:
http://www.dolphinics.com/
Deleted
1000 workstations, each with it's own I/O, so yup, the I/O will scale. The difference is that the OS makes it look like a single machine.
Deleted
Personal experience - 3 DOAs out of 4 boxes, 2 then went on to die again within 3 months of being fixed. E450s and an E10K so we're not talking elcheapo workstations here. I'm still pissed off about it.
NEVER had this kind of trouble with IBM R6K systems. Given a choice, I wouldn't touch Sun hardware again.
Deleted
http://www.dolphinics.com/
Deleted
Sun just aren't there yet. IBM are.
Deleted
Don't forget, the S/390 runs at least three Unix like OSes -- AIX, UTS, and Linux (and I expect there is an AOS for it as well).
Plus the S/390 can run more then one OS at once (one of the more popular OSes for it is/was the single user CMS, just run one per user). That is because the S/390 runs a very low level OS (VM/SP) which offers virtual disk controlers and virtual timers, and the like (including a virtual MMU) to the host OS.
As for reliable, sure. There were S/370s with multi-year uptimes. I would expect the same from the S/390.
I wouldn't say that Solaris is yet QUITE so stable as VMS, however. In terms of hardware, though, I'd reckon about the same. The legendary VAX/VMS uptimes were as much to do with a stable OS as anything else.
IBM? I really don't see an RS/6000 as being any better than a Sun, reliability wise.
Yes, and Microsoft sells 85% of the world's
operating systems. And McDonalds sells a lot
of hamburgers. What's your point?
Does Sun "community source" the code to parts allowing this mass use off SMP CPUs?
Can we "learn" something from their code and (hehe) "clean lab it" into the Linux kernel or into the BSDs? What are the legal ramifications?
qouting Ace's article, pg.2: Since they also wanted to get 1000+ CPUs in a single system, they also had to design the on-chip memory system and interfaces to be able to handle this. When you have a multi-processor system, you need to keep the data coherent in all caches (having the same data at the same time, or else you get bad results) one way or another, and this becomes increasingly difficult as more CPUs are added.
I guess there are alot of issues which are specific to Sun's hardware, so mabye my thought of learning from Sun's SMP code was a moot point. Moot is a fun word to say. Moot. Almost like saying Meept.
Sun Pyrosystems | Posted by Grogg on 12:15 PM February 25th, 12000 B.C.
from the ooga-booga dept.
Kragga write, "I saw good article about UltraSpark 3 at Ace's Rock Field. It goes into depth about technical specs of this fire-burning technology. Best part is second page where they talk about mammoth cooking, roasting, and flamability (up to 1000 BTUs!) There are some excellent examples of mammoth cooking, and fire-starting latency."
-Joe
Electronic design is done mostly on Suns here.
There are no production tools for linux, for
chip or board design.
So who cares......
I would think that there's much more bandwidth inside a machine than through any of it's external connections (any form of ethernet, SCSI, firewire). So long as the tasks that each CPU is doing takes a short time to finish, they'ed probably enjoy the added bandwidth. For tasks that act like Seti@home or any of the distributed net tasks, there'd probably be no advantage, since each CPU gets a chunk of work and then works on that for a while and then asks for more work.
Also, applications need to be written for Beowolf, as far as I know. IF the operating system natively supports upto 1000 processors (i'd assume 1024 would be logical), then that means you can run the same exact binary on a single CPU workstation all the way up to a supercomputer. It'd probably be great for developers of supercomputing applications.. They could test their apps in the same exact atmostpher that they'll be ultimately running in.
Solaris is much slower than Linux on single CPU congifurations, but slap them both into a 64 CPU box and watch which one actually scales higher... Linux will drop off around 8 CPU's.
Now that's lasting value. Not a cutting edge system any more by any means, but it's quite something to still be using a system that old for a production server ...
Exactly. We still use quite a few SS5s and 20s (for those not needing any fast graphics) where I work. Sure they take a lot longer to boot, and logins are slow, but they do the job running the Same OS as the U2s, U60s, and U80s we use for higher-end work. Try taking a measly low-end 486 or 386 from 5-6 years ago and running the same version of NT on it for people to use with the same disk and memory that they used with win 3.1 or whatever back then.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Well you would need 10,000 Ultra Sparcs to get any decent performance. Long live the Alpha EV6.7
"However, from what I can tell, they have mostly hit their design targets, and for the SPEC95 benchmarks, a 600MHz US-3 (the initial clock speed) will be about the same as a 700 MHz Alpha 21264A (EV67)."
Considering how fast the 21264s are, that's one hell of an improvement from the current USparc chips. I for one can't wait. I admit though that Alphas will probably still lead a little, it's too bad they've not yet gained as widespread an acceptance as Sun, HP and x86 CPUs have.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
You moron
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What's interesting to me about Sun is how well they've done by keeping control of their key technology instead of relying on either Microsoft or Intel to supply pieces. Sun has control over their own operating system(s), they're successfully pushing their own language, Java, and they don't have to depend on Intel for their processors.
If this is such a strategy for success, how do you explain the sheer force of Apple in the server or serious workstation marketplace? They've pursued basically the same strategy, yet I can't think of a single company that's bet their datacenter on Macintoshes. Sun's success probably owns more towards being in the right markets at the right time as the internet woke up than anything else.
HP originally entered into the alliance with Intel because of fears it could not afford the next generations of chips, only to be caught in the nightmare situation of having to extend the product lifecycle while waiting for Intel to deliver a product that every other competitor will be able to use anyway.
I always thought the deal for HP was that they had an automatic leg up on all the other vendors by having such intimate access to IA64 before the other vendors did. HP will likely have complete, highly optimized systems for sale on IA64 long before MSFT and the rest of the Wintel crowd does, and a percentage of the profits of IA64 from competitors.
nitpick: 64bit registers don't give you more bandwidth. i think you're thinking of the system bus. 64bit registers eat cache, but are great for long longs.
The article says that it would use a ccNUMA-like design. SGI used this technology to scale to 512 processors with their Origin line.
I'm on an ethernet lan and slashdot is a dog. And yes, the ethernet is the slowest link.
Ryan
The article mentions that reliability is an important criteria for big customers, and that Sun is known for its very reliable but expensive hardware. Even with ultra-reliable hardware, you're not likely to put all your eggs in one server (that's bad cooking ;-), so you have to resort to clustering your big and expensive boxes.
But then, what is the reliability gain over slightly bigger clusters of el-cheapo hardware?
Wow, the people who own these actually could fill out the poll using the number of processors they have!
Walt
wow. emacs? FreeBSD?
hard core!
Just to nitpick on something pointless, FreeBSD/i386 v3.4 Release also uses "ed" as the default editor throughout its installation/inital configuration process. I wanted to start endorsing the NRA after my last installation of FreeBSD :)
:).
Networks function much more naturally under diversity than under conformity.
VectorStar - 2 sparcs, 2 macs, 5 intel boxen. SunOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS X, linux, and NT.
Truly no single point of failure, other than the ISP
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
The HP J5000 Visualize workstation (dual 440 MHz CPUs) weigh 75 lbs and draw up to 1500 watts power supply rating, at least... I don't know how much they actually use). Makes sun look downright energy efficient.
it consumes 75W power ... The heat dissipation of these puppies will be monsterous!</i><br><br>
If it doesn't dissipate all 75 of those watts, I'm going to buy some stock in Sun right now.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Well, a friend of bought an old sun, and its haddrive was bad. All he had to do was call them, give them the original sun part number, and they sent him a replacement. Apparently they will replace any failed hardware that they have made. I thought that was pretty sweet.
Do you realize that the same kernel that will power a 1024 CPU machine is used for a 1 processor computer?
One of the sysadmins at my school has Seti crunching in an SGI Origin 2000's spare time.
That thing spits out a data unit every 18 minutes or so, when it's not in use.
No, ksh and csh are not integral parts of the OS (much less CDE, as I've
gotten on quite fine without it for most of my Unix life, thank you). A
SHELL is an integral part, and ksh and csh are, IMO, not very good choices for these particular itegral parts (when tcsh, bash, and zsh are far better). A C compiler is often considered an integral part of the OS - what would you
think of a Linux distro that shipped gcc 1.0 as the system compiler? As far as I'm concerned, that's about equivalent.
Solaris 8 ships with GCC. A Shell is an important part of your interaction with an OS. If you can't manage that yourself (writing your own aliases, as well as choosing your own shell), you shouldn't be wasting your time with Solaris.
I'm rambling but... liquid cooling is common on CMOS processors and works very well. Unless there is a remarkable change in power consumption the MHz race is going to force the engineers to it. Kryotech, as everyone probably knows, makes a system for the AMD Athlon and reports are good. I expect to see more of these. Aside, I had a colleague who kept a neat array of retired Amdahl processors and their heatsinks on their desk. Neat little designs.
The SGI Origin line actually scales to 1024 processors, and that was a what I read a couple of years ago when the line first came out... Only problem is until recently the largest installation was 128 proc, now it's 512; I believe that the Cray link routers weren't able to keep up passing data between nodes fast enough; they increased the capacity by increasing the performance of the interconnects (I believe that's the case anyway, brains fuzzy today). Technically the arch could probably scale up as large as you want, but a bigtime hit occurs when you have to access a node far away; as the interconnects get faster and faster you can build larger and larger archs.
ccNUMA rocks
Actually Irix IS the most scalable OS out there, maybe Unicos... but it at least is MUCH more scalable the Solaris. In production today 512 proc SGI Origin 2k running Irix, biggest Solaris 64 proc. Reliable... well that's about as subjective as you can get... for example I've had this experience with SGI's (I'm sure you've had the exact opposite... hence subjective)
I had a Sun certified teacher jaw drop one day. Had a load level of ~300 on a little 2 proc Origin200 doing something like 6k context switch per second spinning it's wheels like hell (poor little abused box), she couldn't believe that box was not completely overwhelmed; it was running just fine one could hardly actually notice that it was being pushed pretty hard. I asked her if she ever saw a Sun box taking that kind of load and remaining that responsive, all she could do was shake her head.
I've not had any bad experiences with Suns either, I believe they could probably go head to head and be a dead heat. Only problem is that SGI marketing sucks big time, you say SGI server and people look dumb founded, no they are not JUST graphic boxes. They have the quickest backplain around, we chose them for that reason we throw around terabytes of data like it was nothing. The really sad part is that SGI is going to get bought up some time in the next 5 years because they can't market squat to anybody... going the way of the Alpha sad really. Damn that got longer than I expected...
Chris is right. J-K's have been around for a long time, but that doesn't mean you stop developing them. For example, you can buy J-K ttl chips from Motorola or National Semiconductor for next to nothing, but a typical propogation delay would be around 15-20 ns and a maximun MHz rating of about 30 or so (and this is just for one flip-flop!!). I've built very simple logic devices that had several levels of logic gates and flip-flops. I'm sure that modern CPU's have many, many more.
In short, the only important things about J-K flip-flops are stuff like propogation delay, power consumption, how long it can hold it's value, etc. How fast you can run the processor in the end depends a lot on the quality of materials (like J-K's and gates). The quality of materials depends on how good your semiconductor physicists were at designing them.
I'm not an AC, but I just thought I'd let you know that "its" is the possesive form of "it." "It's" is the contraction for "it is." Check your last sentence. Good thing we're here to correct you. ;-)
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
. I think any serious computer user should learn at least some basics of computer architecture
yet the article contains the sentence:
For optimizing some parts they even developed their own "edge triggered flip-flop" (a low-level component that "catches" a bit of information), and so on.
The J-K bistable (also known as a flip-flop) is the basis of sequential logic. It is the fundamental building block of CPUs. And they are all essentially triggered by the edge on the clock cycle. Consequently I suspect that the author might want to follow your advice as he makes the development sound quite grandiuse, when in fact they have been around for longer than my lifetime.
He could, of course, just be providing a pretty poor explanation of what a flip-flop is.
and no "it's like a sandal" gags please.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
I'll just buy PSEG (my powercompany) stocks. Much better bet, if you ask me.
<grub> Reading
How many Major Data centre's run on 4 systems with 4gb RAM and 128 processors using Intel systems? can this even be done? Sun is pretty much the only way to go when you get into "Big Business" that requires 99.999%-100% up time.
If you are going to comment on something understand it first!
this is in reply to the first moderation posted on the system, which , isn't (as far as I can tell) complete ty lined up with the celestial bodies, for instance, and this is certainly NOT the first uh post replied to the sytem, "Hi, how are you doing today?" And it said, "Just find, thank you, 404, BUrp.." But that is all in a day swork. Now it is off to the movies, to develop several intriguing photographs which I think of in my mind, but I am too aloine to consider this parity of bliss
After reading that article I am slightly more impressed with Sun as far as hardware goes. I have had the chance to use a Few Sparc's in my time and own a Dual 73Mhz Sparc with 256M of Ram It runs lots of muds! :)
:-(.
I love it and I got it for around 1000 Dollars and I dont think I would trade it for a dual 400Mhz Celeron system any time.
Sounds a little silly I am sure because the celerons are mostly likely smoking fast and the 2 or 3 people continually compiling on the server would be happy.. but its been up and running for over 2 years!
I have had to take it down twice. Once to add 128M of ram a friend bought for me and another time to add a *much* bigger HD for it
No other downtimes or little weird things. I also have a linux server and I *have* to reboot it maybe every 2 days or so. Faulty hardware or what I dont know but it takes some serious hits from people compiling a lot on it and you could compile once and the mud would compile fine.. Try again and gcc is terminating with some obscure error. I read and read and searched for anything on the error. I looked *everywhere* and tried elmost everything under the sun and it would still do it intermittently. still does..
And just reading about how delayed the Ultra SparcIII that is impressive.They are not just rushing the chip to market. They are refning it and fixing bugs so that it does not have like 60+ bugs like a PIII ( 60!! holy shit I paid over 240 dollars for mine ). NOT cool.Anyways im sort of rambling. But I do think sun sells superior products. I just would rather have a MS software dominated world with sun hardware.. *keeps dreaming*
JA
I realize this is a troll, yet - very unfortunately - this does look like a typical /. response. Cheers,
I had Sparcstation 5 (NOT Ultra 5) for 4 years. First, I've replaced a 100Mhz CPU with 170Mhz. Next I got some extra memory (164MB instead of 64). I got rid of CDE and installed FVWM instead. Finally I got a 3rd party graphic adapter ('frame buffer'), also very fast. All this made the performance quite acceptable. Now of course it is finally at the end of its life cycle (and I've moved to a different company anyway)
Don't flame me, I know it's that the network is only so fast and has nothing to do with the number of processors...
kwsNI
we benchmarked EJBoss on solaris 2.7 (UII) Wintel and Lintel. Yes EJBoss is 100% java.
Wintel came first, not thanks to the win part since it was the SUN 1.3 vm, not even the tel part since the chip was Athlon. Lintel did OK but not as good as Wintel DUE TO THE SHITTY STATE OF VMs TODAY (still waiting for a VM 1.3 port). Slowlaris... ahem, ahem... showed up last! ultraSPARC II is just DOG SLOW.
What irony, java is creating a level playing field that clearly shows that SPARC is behind x86? ouch!
This should also be a clear sign for the Linux Vendors, PUT OUT A GOOD VM on linux and I will switch from Windows to Linux IN A HEARTBEAT... because I DON"T CARE ABOUT THE OS!!!!!!
marc
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
1000 CPU's? Could you imagine the kind of framerates you could get in Q3 with that kind of processing power? God, that's lustful...
Mike Liska, Electrical Engineering Technology and Computer Engineering Technology Undergrad, Purdue University.
... and the 4 CPU model comes with a coffeemaker and hot water dispenser for Ramen noodles. Hackers world over will love this :-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Forgotten to logout or tick "Post Anonymously", he?
Absolutely not. That link is used, in fact, by several elite trolls in this forum. The Chide Molesta is one of them, if I am not mistaken. But no, I did not intend to post that anonymously. I, Jesus Christ, would not stoop so low.
People who live in Anonymous houses shouldn't throw stones, Mr. AC.
Or something.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I hate to agree with you, but I do. Why do we geeks love seeing pics of CPUs? I mean, it's the performance that counts, right? And once it's in the box you never see it unless you're dusting or plugging in more RAM.
I guess it's because guys are very "visual". Women don't get pr0n. CPU pics are geek pr0n.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I used emacs to write the whole article in HTML . . . Written on a FreeBSD box too
Soul brotha! I do all my coding in Emacs and XEmacs, currently on FreeBSD 3.3. (and hopefully on 4.0 by mid-March! Rock!)
I love coding straight HTML. I put out pages that are smaller (in KB), faster, more efficient, and better looking. As a bonus, I know exactly where to go and what to do when something breaks or I need to update. (Another bonus is getting to act elitist around the Win32 Frontpage lusers)
Actually, I use Emacs for coding pretty much everything. C, Java, Perl, HTML, JavaScript... Emacs is there for me. The only thing an IDE comes in handy for, IMHO, is when you have to port something to Windows. M$ never intended anyone to code their little widgets by hand, and it shows.
My only question is... why did you feel the need to post and tell everyone that? Did someone accuse you of being a Frontpage weenie?
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I agree. Yes, the specs are hot. I damn near creamed my jeans just looking at them. But, how fscking hard is it to post a pic?
If that Gates guy ever comes around I'll rip his fscking kneecaps off!
There's nothing special about 2TB support. First, you can already do that on UltraSPARC, and second, Alpha is a fairly obscure platform (right or wrong, it is). What would be real news is if
working for a company which has nearly completed the process of dumping Sun in favor of FreeBSD and Linux solutions[...]run an operating system which has no compiler included
Linux runs great on Sun systems. You imply that Sun and Linux are mutually exclusive; they are not. JMHO of course, but I find that Linux on UltraSPARC is far superior to Linux on peecees. If you like Linux on peecees, you'll like it on Sun hardware too, and in that realm the hardware isn't nearly as dodgy as peecees. If your budget makes Sun hardware impossible, fine. But don't imply that Linux on peecees can touch Linux on Suns. It can't even come close, and the hardware is clearly the limiting factor. It may meet your needs, and that's fine, but there's no reason to imply that a good, complete, low-cost OS and nice hardware are mutually exclusive. It sounds to me like you should have used your existing hardware and simply switched operating systems if the OS was giving you trouble. Oh well, more used Sun equipment for me to buy cheap.
Yep. We have those too, and they are complete shit. As people say, "the only thing Sun about an Ultra 5 is the price." I'm sure the Sun technical people are sick of being hated over the U5/10. If you look at it, the decision to develop that kind of system could only have come from marketing. There's no way anyone at Sun really believes an U5 is worth having. If you want to judge Sun's workstations, get an Ultra 2 or an Ultra 80. These machines typify Sun's capabilities. Expensive but worth it.
Will SparcStations be able to survive the onslaught?
Well, the most recent machine to carry that name is obsolete, and only the fastest versions of it are still useful. So I'd say no. :) If you mean "will SPARC survive" then the question is more difficult. There will always be a market for something that isn't Intel (ie doesn't carry the baggage of the 4004 along with it). Whether that will be SPARC I don't know. Your question about McKinley destroying its competition is likewise unanswerable. Intel is betting a lot on what is really unproven technology while the traditional RISC makers are improving their technology one step at a time. By the time Intel finally ships their sooper-dooper new processors they may be well behind the "older" technology of other vendors like Decompaq and TI/Sun. If so, SGI would be foolish to ditch MIPS. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
My suspicion is that IA-64 is going to have less impact on server configuration than one might expect, certainly less than the "Gartner cheerleading" used to indicate. After all, on servers, the important thing is not the CPU, but rather the combination of I/O subsystems, whether:
I could readily see "workstations" getting "killed off," what with PC's getting more and more powerful.
But the big deal for anything higher-end is the buses, and not merely the CPUs, which makes the bluster about CPUs pretty moot...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Gee, I'd better tell my financial services and telecommunications clients to put all their mission critical application development on hold while you make up your mind.
I mean, any OS that uses CDE and comes with csh and ksh as the shells
Right, because these are integral parts of the operating system. I see.
That "sometimes" was carefully put in ^-^ On Sun's site I once came across a policy document explaining that they don't think pre-announcing things too much is a good idea. (of course, they don't always do this, particularly with completely new products, though this is more understandable - particularly when you want 3rd party developers to get on board).
I value this, but on the other hand, it still does get annoying sometimes ^-^
At their 4th quarter 1999 results annoucement, they were asked when US-3 systems were going to become available. They said that the final US-3 design had been finished - ie it was completely tested and ready for production. They also quite clearly said that they won't give release dates (even vague ones) partly so that competitors won't get a chance to start laying on the FUD beforehand...
If you're interested, here's the relevant paragraph from the IEEE Micro paper:
When the first US-3 samples came out, there was a pic with Scott McNealy holding a US-3 in his hand, but it was never posted on Sun's site and the original copy of it has long since gone. Since the part isn't actually shipping to customers yet, there are no "official" pictures yet.
I did think about doing some graphics for the article, but couldn't think of something that would really help...
See /usr/src/linux/arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c:
I've personally had it running on an E4000. Apparently, Sun gave davem access to a starfire to allow him to add the support.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What's greatly needed for larger systems is often a lot of main memory. The standard PC limit of 1 GB main memory is a major pain in the @$$ when you need some serious computation done.
At my department we need machines with lots and lots of memory. Currently we have a 4-CPU Sun with 4 GB memory, but that's really too small. Around 24 GB would be more along our needs. (Coding and crypto research, eats lots of MB's).
You can get a lot of memory by using clustered machines (or an Origin 2000, SP/2 or whatever), but it's kind-of silly to use a parallel computer just to get the memory, but not the parallelism...
Anyway, the sooner we can get more than 1-4 GB into a standard PC the better. The need is already here.
What's interesting to me about Sun is how well they've done by keeping control of their key technology instead of relying on either Microsoft or Intel to supply pieces. Sun has control over their own operating system(s), they're successfully pushing their own language, Java, and they don't have to depend on Intel for their processors.
I think that in the long run Sun is going to do a lot better than say HP who has spread themselves really thin trying to be all things to all people. HP originally entered into the alliance with Intel because of fears it could not afford the next generations of chips, only to be caught in the nightmare situation of having to extend the product lifecycle while waiting for Intel to deliver a product that every other competitor will be able to use anyway. And Intel leveraged the alliance into getting HP to give away compiler and other technology for free. Nice for Intel, not so nice for HP.
DEC had the Alpha but got caught trying to rely on Microsoft for NT. Too bad NT on the Alpha was always an unwanted stepchild, but that's what happens when a company is dependent on another company. You're screwed if you're not a priority to them.
SGI same thing, total failure trying to sell their own NT workstations on Intel hardware.
I don't get it, it just seems common sense to me for companies to keep control of technology. That's why Sun is beating Microsoft like a drum in court today over Java, because they own it.
I hope that's a typo because I wouldn't want to be the guy paying the utility bills for a U-SPARC datacenter. I think the SPARC is being out performed by other cheaper processors but I also think alot of people are forgetting something. SPARC boxes running Solaris will crawl at times with a single processor but as you add processors the system's speed increases dramatically. Try building a 16 processor Xeon box running Linux, without a major kernel overhaul it won't run very well. Solaris runs right out of the box on as many processors as you want. Anyways, back to the processor. That thing is a monster using a .25 micron die. Using such a huge die (compared to MPPC and x86 processors) has the disadvantage of producing alot of heat. Sun needs to invest in shrinking down their die sizes to get more computational power for the same price instead of just making things more complex. Maybe even a .22 or .18 micron SPARC? If it were my datacenter I think I might go with the U-SPARC 3. Oh and for you people calling Sun/SPARC/Solaris slow because you used an Ultra 5, grab some more RAM, a graphics adapter add-on, and use something other than CDE and I think you'll see a performance boost.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
My school uses exclusively Sun servers and all the admins I've talked to sing high praises of them. But I've been stuck working on our Sun Ultra5 worstations far too often, and they are TERRIBLE. Sooooo sloooooow. They're configured with 128M of RAM and, if I remember right, a 300 mHz sparc. My PII-350 with Linux and the same amount of RAM is much more responsive. Not to mention that they go down with alarming frequency, and they cost four times what I paid for my intel box around the same time period.
I can understand why Intel-based machines (both Win32 and Linux) are making so much market headway. It'll be interesting to see what RISC workstations really survive after McKinley comes out and people like SGI start producing the kind of first rate hardware (graphics, bus, etc) that has been differentiating Sparc/Mips/PA-RISC workstations up until now. Will SparcStations be able to survive the onslaught? Should Sun really care if they do (especially since workstations are a low-growth market while the server-side growth potential is enormous)?
--JRZ
In a way. On the other hand, I think it's kind of cool Sun doesn't make all kinds of promises and delivery dates, only to ship something with errors or getting scored at for not keeping their promises, but instead, they just work on it with an "it's ready when it's ready" attitude. And just as you wrote in your article that for Sun reliability is more important than performance, reliability is also more important then fanfare.
Makes you think there's still some hacker culture not taken over by marketing droids left.
-- Abigail
Hell, just water-cool the suckers. Last time I saw a "bare" Sparc chip, it was topped with a metal plate and 2 cylinders (like pins, kinda fat though). Onto those pins you attached a pair of round heatsinks (stacked discs). Replace the heatsinks with some kind of water "jacket" and away you go. Fewer problems than with refidgeration. Might want to use a non-conductive liquid rather than water, now that I think about it, unless it's pure H2O.
Thanks for your reply. ctcm measures `movsd` which is a load and a store for each word. If I should have 4112 MB/s @ 539 MHz, that's 7.6 bytes read and 7.6 bytes written each clock. Not very likely unless I've got a 128bit path or dual ported SRAM. But you are right, ctcm is more a measure of bandwidth than latency.
I dug out my pseudrorandom access asm timer. I measure 10.7 Mreads/s from DRAM (9.1 busclocks), 20.0 Mreads/s from L2 (27 Celeron CPU clks) and 525 Mreads/s from L1 (1.03 CPU clks). So L1 seems single cycle, but L2 looks oddly slow, perhaps due to unintended thrashing.
As for the power/die budget, I'm afraid I don't know enough about chip feature design. But from all the micrographs I've seen, L1 is a fairly small portion of the die, so doubling it wouldn't be too painful. It also appears disproportionately large compared to L2, so something like this has probably been done.
First, high compliments on an outstanding and insightful article on one high-end of the computing business. It is easy to forget there are other aspects than the max-CPU performance sought by hobbyists.
The discussion of architectural performance benefits was very clear and insightful. There are obvious limits to multi-issue architectures.
A few corrections, if indeed I am correct: Main memory fetch is _not_ the oft-quoted "hundreds of CPU cycles". Typical SDRAM timing is 6-1-1-1, or 9 bus cycles per 32byte cache line. For a 600 MHz CPU with a 6x multiplier, this is 54 cycles, plus perhaps a few for page misses, etc.
Also, AFAIK at least Intel's P6 x86 core has a 1 CPU cycle latency L1 cache. Such a fast cache is necessary to make up for the risible shortage of x86 registers and helps considerably with stack-based operations such as often generated by `c` code. I do know that I can realize three RISC-type uops per clock cycle when 33-50% of the uops are loads from L1.
What do you see in the crystal ball?
1000 CPUs. 500 of them each serving thier dumb little SunRays. 20 of them serving web contents. I see network congestion and a bankrupcy.
moral of the story: Yes, you got 1000 CPUs. Can your I/O handle it?
You can do far worse than that.. Just take a P166, say, like my computer.. Then run a copy of xlock on it (-delay 0) you can find modes that'll use >10,000 context switches per second.. Then run a few hundred copies of 'cat /dev/zero >/dev/null', nice them to 10 or 15. Under X, it does get a little annoying to use, but from a console you don't even notice the load. (And with amp's realtime playback, your MP3's go through with nary a pop or stutter.
;] concurrently to all of the above, but I expect it to handle that too.
:)
True, I haven't also tried a forkbomb [while (fork()>=0)
Linux can handle that load fine, even on a little old P16, so your anecdote doesn't carry much weight, at least with me.
There have been machines that almost worked that way. One of the early hypercube machines (N-Cube? IIRC) had a master node, and 2**N small nodes with a CPU, RAM, and communication connectors. It took care of virtual memory by assigning each process as many nodes as it needed, rather than assigning blocks from a shared memory space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Its fairly obvious - anyone who passes off ridiculous statements like "x86 has no place in production environment" clearly hasn't been in one, ever.
Before you reply, decide whether you consider half the web companies running multibillion operations on linux/BSD running on x86 not to be in "production".
Like it or lump it, disposable computing is the way to go. If you're going to upgrade a box in 18 months, why get fleeced on the price?
As it stands, Sun boxes at the high end do have nice features - at the low end, the quality is typically far inferior to what you get in name brand PCs.
Don't tell that to nearly every company running a server farm at any colocation I've ever been to in Silicon Valley, or to nearly any Frotune 500 company that invariably uses Intel boxes in almost all environments.
Intel sells 85% of the world's CPUs. They're everywhere. Deal with it.
Sooner or later Sun will have to combat the Lintel market directly - the low end is where its at for web companies in particular (no, no one runs Apache on an E10k).
Sun's current strategy is to continue to go higher up the food chain, but they're soon going to find out that IBM is defending their mainframe turf vigorously, with uptimes and sustainability that even Sun boxes can't touch.
Meanwhile, companies like VA are eating Sun's lunch at the low end.
I predict that pressures from both directions will invariably force Sun to choose the weaker opponent - VA - and attack the low end vigorously. Thats going to mean lower prices for the same equipment. Look for lower Sun profits as the Linux freeware brigade takes it toll on Sun's fat margins.
No, you're confusing "control" with "closed". Sun used to actually be about open systems - now its about Sun end-to-end solutions that are out of step with trends in open computing.
Sun has control over their own operating system(s),they're successfully pushing their own language, Java
You don't follow standards proceedings, do you? Sun's recent double-talk attempt at "opening" Java was met with deserved jeers - Sun wants to control the code in a closed fashion while having the moral legitimacy of an blessed standard. Thankfully other companies joined with ISO and ECMA to derail this ludicrous strategy. Sun's moves with Java smack of pure McNealy arrogance.
SGI same thing, total failure trying to sell their own NT workstations
SGI was already doomed when they took this step. Their downfall had little to do with their strategy with regards to NT.
I don't get it, it just seems common sense to me for companies to keep control of technology.
Like Microsoft keeping undocumented calls in its API?
If the existence of the Internet hasn't convinced of the value of open standards, then really there is no hope for you.
Excuse me to go into the petty details of... graphical gratifiacation... but 3 pages of specs, no PICTURE!? is there a pic of the damn thing? did i miss it?
Istigkeit -"is-ness" being and becoming & i'dfiying it with the mathematical abstraction of the idea
1000 processors... that's enough to spell check an article that hemos wrote! maybe there is hope after all.
WOW! And people think that Intel chips (and Alphas) consume a lot of power!
They are a bit power hungry, but for applications where you need them (bad enough to cough up $10,000+), you won't care! Let's face it, these are not PCs we're talking about here.
The large die size is required to cram everything they want (for performance reasons) on a single die. I imagine that they're speced at .25 because it's a lot easier to move to a finer process than to a coarser one. Also, nobody minds if you come in better than spec.
I fail to see how 1000 CPUs is of any advantage. A few maybe (up to 8 or so). Go overboard and they'll burn cycles just waiting for access to memory, etc.
In an SMP machine, that is absolutly true. On a bus, 4-8 is about the limit. a crossbar connection can scale to more like 32 or 64 (but the OS becomes a mess with all the locks). After that, NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) is in order. In those systems, CPUMemory access is kept off the common path as much as possable (sort of like splitting an overcrowded ethernet segment in half with a brouter).
The 1000 CPU machine will be less tightly coupled than SMP, but more tightly coupled than Beowulf. (On that scale, uniprocessor is trivially the most tightly coupled, and a sort of distributed net over floppies would be the loosest).
The 8M cache is a big help in any event.
Sun's high-end kit doesn't take a standard mains socket either ^-^ But no prob - most places you're likely to install them will have the required power supplies. The Starfire can have up to 5 redundant power line cords, each of which has to be able to handle 24 amps...
The reason why the power consumption is so high is that there's so many pins on the packaging, there's so many high-bandwidth data pipes etc. Ie it's both because they're using slightly out of date fabs from TI, and because of the design. The UltraSPARC-IIs consume much much less power - they're a lot smaller and were originally designed for a 0.45 micron process, I think it was.
Its good to see a decent review of a chip from an architectural standpoint. Sites like Ars are starting to address such things, but don't go into much technical detail.
The cache discussion is very interesting. Its true that most academic papers make large simplifying assumptions. (You spend that much time running hardware sims, and you'll look for ways to simplify your life, too.) Its interesting that other companies maintained those assumptions in their designs, even when they weren't particularly valid.
This paper is also good for illustrating the simple fact that processor performance relies on a hell of a lot more than just MHz. I think any serious computer user should learn atleast some basics of computer architecture, so that they will be better informed when comparing different hardware systems.
Most software folks I know (except the compiler guys) are fairly ignorant of computer architecture as a field. Articles like this are good for drawing people in a bit. Many techies are drawn to Linux because they can see what's "under the hood". Its also good to know a bit about what's "under the hood" of your hardware.
--Lenny
However, make sure you're comparing like for like. It's easy to say 'Well, I can buy a 450 MHz processor, 18GB of disk and 256MB of RAM as a PC for ~$1000, and as a Sun for ~3000, so Suns are overpriced' but that's not the full story.
...] Also, Sun systems generally have better memory bandwidth, IO bandwidth, etc. than PCs of seemingly equivalent spec. And they last *forever*.
...
...
Sun systems are made to a much higher quality than any PC I've ever found, even the high end servers from Compaq et al. [this doesn't mean that a few products of theirs haven't been total dogs, but in general
I'm involved in running the web site for a public radio station, running on hand-me-down Sun equipment obtained from the affiliated university.
We're serving a web site, doing audio streaming in both GTS's Java technology and Shoutcast, DNS service, plus email and interactive logons for about 50 staff members
On what hardware?
One SPARCstation 5. Single SPARC processor, I think 50 (50!) MHz, 128Mb memory, old scsi disk. The system must be six years old at least.
Now that's lasting value. Not a cutting edge system any more by any means, but it's quite something to still be using a system that old for a production server
The things that they do don't require as much CPU as they need disk and memory speed. Sun delivers in that department.
I'm working at IBM, and our AIX servers are pretty much the same. Slow CPU's, but pretty good disk storage and plenty of RAM. This is exactly what we need to run DB2 and Apache. And we've got the 2nd biggest web site (dollar wise) on the internet. These are the things that are important.
Microsoft has a serious problem in this department. Their OS only runs on Intel platforms, and for sheer IO power, the Intel platforms lag behind the others. Even if W2K is a sweet reliable OS, it still can only go as fast as the hardware.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Why was this posted and the article on 2 TB memory support on Alpha Linux by SuSE that I submitted rejected, not once, but twice? SPARC is very cool, but the article isn't all that exciting IMO.
/. content (I mean, come on, helping the very crooks to market their product through reviews days after they've declared war on the community you purport to support?). Given that editorial history I doubt your complaining, or mine, will have any significant effect.
:-) And despite all of the flaws, there is still sufficient good content here for me to keep coming back, reading the stories that interest me, and posting comments (most of them much more on topic than this).
I have to concur. I am generally not one to complain about editorial choices here, but 2 Terabyte memory support under Linux is IMHO much more interesting than the latest rumormongering from Sun. At the very least, both stories could have been linked.
However, a story I forwarded from the mp3.com mailing list a while back (about the RIAA suit against them) was also dumped in favor of a movie review, mere days after the Motion Picture Association of America had begun thoroughly stomping the testicles of the Open Source community in the form of lawsuits against DeCSS, etc. Even something as dramatic as that didn't seem to have much affect on
However, all is not lost. Commander Taco, Hemos, et. al. have been kind enough to release the sources to slashdot under the GPL, so you and I both are free to take our sour grapes and ferment them into the wine of another, parallel open source site.
As a final aside, working for a company which has nearly completed the process of dumping Sun in favor of FreeBSD and Linux solutions, I found the entire story rather amusing. While there are certainly specialized applicaitons which will demand 1000 processor in parallel hardware, just about any job can be achieved far less expensively, and with far more flexibility, simply by using a beowulf, or similar, cluster of inexpensive PCs on the Open Source operating system of your choice. Of course, Sun Marketing will undoubtably convince some that they absolutly cannot live without the latest UltraSparc Millenium Parallel Honking Machine From Hell/1000, which can be yours for a mere $8.7 x 10^16 and will even run an operating system which has no compiler included (such "add-on" parts sold seperately at still greater cost) and still, to this day, defaults to "ed" whenever an unfortunate user attempts a "crontab -e".[1]
[1]setting the EDITOR environment variable to "vi" or "emacs" will override this, but that doesn't make the default any less inane.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yes, this has always been one of the good points of Sun. I used to work for a company where developers had single CPU workstations (from Ultra 5's down all the way to Sparc Classics), but production machines would be multi-processor machines (up to 32 processors at some clients). No recompilation needed. Sun hardware really scales well - of course, kudos should go as well to the kernel, because if the kernel doesn't support scaling to multi processors well, the hardware won't do you much good.
-- Abigail
So this is a 600 MHz RISC processor using .25 micron fabrication processes; that should be pretty fast. However, it consumes 75W power? AND the 750 MHz will consume an estimated 90W power (at .25 micron)?!?!
WOW! And people think that Intel chips (and Alphas) consume a lot of power! The heat dissipation of these puppies will be monsterous! If you had a dual CPU workstation with 2 600MHz US-3s, the CPUs alone would require (at most) 150W of power. What sort of power supply would that need? 300W+, right? I'd really rather not have one of these sitting under my desk, considering the fan noise from the power supply, case and CPU fans.
Why can't they use a smaller die size (which should reduce the power reqs and heat dissipation)? Is it just Sun's fabs, or is there some architechtural reason? Or are the power consumption specs they quote just OFF?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Its all about how fast the system can service request and not how fast a single app runs. My Ultra10 at work is very responsive even under heavy load (Loads of > 1.0). Plus Sun machines are very balanced. You don't have the CPU waiting for the memory, disk, etc. Unlike PC's today where the CPU's are fast, but are hindered by ATA disks, high latency caches and memory
I've already started writing a 2nd article, this time on Sun's MAJC chips, which have lots of interesting features. Yummy. The reason why I'm doing a bit about Sun hardware is because (a) I tend to follow what they're up to because they do occationally do pretty interesting stuff, and (b) nobody else has written much...
Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though. If you actually look at Sun's site, there's almost nothing about the US-3 technically. Still have to wait until Sun start actually selling US-3 hardware before can be certain of anything...