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Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra?
argonaut writes "Ace's Hardware has an in-depth article on Niagara -- Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each. The article discusses the chip's radical architecture and what kind of performance can be expected from it in traditionally thread-heavy server applications like web hosting, databases, and other multi-user applications. Given the recent cancellation of the UltraSPARC V, it seems this is going to be Sun's new direction for its in-house CPU design efforts. Furthermore, both Intel and IBM are working on other highly parallel processors and AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron. So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?"
Not to destroy the lovely mental image in this thread. Well, here is the story, Sun is working on Niagra and the Rock. The Rock would combine the single-threaded approach of the UltraSparc product line with the multithreaded architecture of the Niagra processor ... check out the complete atricle
The only really significant change needs to be in the lower levels of Solaris' scheduler, so that it handles the context switches properly. Solaris already does that for existing SPARC architectures with thread level parallelism support. The only difference the OS sees is the caches and the number of available "slots" for running LWPs.
Of course, you'll only see a significant benefit when you've lots of threads in the run-ready state (which mostly happens when you have lots of threads, period). Given java's fondness for threads, and solaris' already outstanding handling of systems with thousands of threads, this seems like a smart optimisation choice.
So, with the necessary Solaris installed, your existing Tomcat running on your existing JVM will see all the benefits.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
A great number of people use sparcs to run Oracle databases.
Current Oracle licensing schemes require that clients pay PER CPU CORE, for multi core processors. This screws anyone that uses Sun boxes, because the cores are US2 based. So the Oracle client has to pay heaps of cash to use, effectively, a 5 year old processor design. In addition, Oracle licensing requires that if your server has the capacity to hold more than 4 processors (eg cores) thes you have to pay the "enterprise" rates.
So in conclusion, the price of Oracle on a 2 cpu Xeon, AMD, or Ultra sparc 3 is about $6000. The price for Oracle on a 2 cpu Niagra (8 cores each) will be $320,000. Only an idiot will use this cpu (or this database). Since a lot of companies have a huge investment in Oracle, they will have no choice but to switch to x86 hardware. Sun is going to kill themselves with this design, despite the fact that the design, in itself, will greatly improve the throughput of their servers.
Oracle licensing is heavily slanted toward intel arcitecture, they have always penalized people for using risc based processors.
The Niagara processor and its successor, Rock, are based almost entirely on the Hydra processor that Professor Kunle Olukotun developed at Stanford University. He co-founded the company, Afara Websystems, that Sun Microsystems purchased. If you want to know how Niagara works, just check out the Hydra processor.
The reason that Sun Microsystems abandoned the UltraSPARC V and successors is that the design teams who developed the UltraSPARC processors after the UltraSPARC II were just horrible. Normally, when engineers develop the microarchitecture and eventually the Verilog model of the chip, a documentation engineer documents all aspects of the chip. In the case of Sun Microsystems, there was no documentation engineer. Ultimately, on the very day that Sun released its processor to the market, no documentation existed.
Even Sun's own engineers did not have the documentation to develop the boards that would accept an UltraSPARC processor. The whole experience is incredibly stupid but true. Most engineers on the processor teams are Indians or Taiwanese, and they just "do not do documentation". Various Linux gurus complained about the lack of documentation needed to port Linux to the latest version of the UltraSPARC. Sun would have loved to produce the documentation if it existed. Unfortunately, it just did not exist.
UltraSPARC V had the same problem. The whole design process for the UltraSPARC V was a mess, and canceling the project fixed the mess.
Sun does not have the engineers with the skills to build a fat-core processor. So, Sun moved to thin-core processors like Niagara. They are easier to build and to document. They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.
Unfortunately, for Sun, what is easy for Sun to design and build is also very easy for IBM and HP to design and build. If you IBM and HP engineers are reading this article, you are in luck. Just check out the Hydra processor, and you will know the 80% of microarchitecture of the Niagara processor. Fortunately, for you guys, building a Hydra-based processor that executes the Power instruction set architecture (ISA) or the HP ISA is much easier than building a processor that executes the SPARC ISA. Those damned 128-register register windows diminish the number of cores that can be squeezed onto the die.
I would like nothing more than to see Sun's processor department setting by 2008. Sun should not be in the business of designing processors. The UltraSPARC-III fiasco should have been a big clue.
If Sun were purely a software house, we'd have a chance of making a profit.