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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?"
Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra?
Best. Title. Ever.
To the might of IBM's Power CPU!
...what the hell? Sun is producing servers optimized to send spam now? What does it mean?!
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
It hardens your old server? My server is still pretty new, so I guess it doesn't need it.
" Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each."
Without warning, underwear tents pop up all over the country.
"Derp de derp."
Good thing I didn't receive an e-mail about this story in my e-mail box or it would have been nuked as spam.
Seriously though, why did the author have to use the term Viagra to simple mean 'performance boost'?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
works better than Viagra?
The obvious answer: Sure it will. Assuming the ability to have them will in fact be used by the software running on the thing - which may still take a while.
Viagra is 'posed to make your one thing big and strong. Niagra is all about slicing and dicing one big thing into multiple threads. The mental image makes my knees ache...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron
If Opteron rhymed with Levitra, I could make a pretty funny joke here...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
It's the same thing that's been happening for the last decade. As x86 slowly creeps in on Sun/IBM/Whatever's market, they have to come up with something "bigger".
Right now, the Opteron, with embedded memory controller and gobs of I/O, has really entered what was previously a niche market that Sun made very nice profits from.
So, now that particular cash-cow has fallen to the ravages of commodity parts, they're moving their sites even higher. Sun's never been the company to make $5 profit on each of 50 million computers, they'd much rather make $300,000 each on 1,000 computers.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Any advances Sun may have in CPU performance will be greatly outweighed by two major engineering design flaws they've gotten themselves in to:
1. overall system performance of their partitionable systems (i.e. the ones people will pay a premium for over low-end systems where Linux on Intel/AMD is killing them) is severely hampered by their 150MHz (Mhz!) backplane. Sun views this as a plus because it allows customers to run boards with differenc CPU speeds (e.g. a 750MHz board (5x backplane speed) and a 900MHz board (6x backplane speed)). So, board to board thruput suffers and overall scalability is reduced.
2. Their desire for greater hardware isolation between domains, down to only a 2 or 4 CPU board with whatever memory happens to be installed on those boards, severely limits the flexibility in providing workload management between logical servers (domains), as well as less flexibility to create / deploy fewer, smaller servers. IBM's LPAR architecture, and HP's VPARs, are kicking Sun's ASS!
especially for server software that threads.
I'm especially intrigued on how this will
work with the Java NIO (new IO) libraries,
which handle pooled selectable IO channels.
Niagra and Java NIO together looks like
a really fast way to do mass serving...
Can anyone comment on threads sharing IO?
I hope that they've made some vast improvements or they're gonna have some serious issues feeding that beast. Systems now, even the Opteron which is among the better mem controllers around for a commodity processor, still have issues with wait states. Uberthreading it and dumping more cores on the chip will only make the situation worse unless they do a serious upgrade of the memory controller.
If they do not, why pay bazillion bucks for a processor that is idle for most of the time?
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
If the processor runs for more than 4 hours continuously or if I have a heart condition?
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
If your server stays up for longer than 4 hours at a time, seek emergency medical attention!
No matter how impressive the architecture happens to be, it will be evaluated by comparing it with a rack of P4's.
How many Power server systems does IBM ship compared with x86 systems?
Revenue per system might be better for high end systems, but the volume - the market size - is just not growing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If Sun doesn't cancel this one, it could put them back on the map for server & enterprise-class computing. Low power, awesome multi-threading capabilities, and software that could only be described as "bad-ass" (The 3D Desktop should be out by then) will give Sun a huge edge over everyone that would take years to catch up.
But that's a big "if."
Viagra only works where the sun doesn't shine!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The world is going to end if we ever give a computer viagra...I mean, it almost ended when we gave it to my grandpa...
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
When can we expect the "Sun is dead" threads to reach the frequency of the "Apple is dead" threads? I await that day with great anticipation.
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
Yes, you're right. Except, of course, that the price to performance ratio of the X86 platform remains unmatched; X86-64 has removed some of the limitations of this platform; limitations that made it unsuitable for the high end, and now Intel has been forced to follow. I fear for Sun's long-term future. on the long run, value for money always wins in business. Or so I think.
The Cell processor follows the same design idea, if not more radical. Sony has cross licensed it to IBM and Toshiba. Toshiba is already planning on using Cell in high end processing.
The big question is if bandwidth constraints will choke these massively parallel superscalar processors.
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 ##
This actually brings up something that I have been thinking about recently, what classifies something as commodity hardware. It's not as if an opteron box can be had for a tremendously low price, HP's quad processor opteron box starts at approx $20K. I don't really consider that "commodity". Compare that to a quad Xeon box for $26K. And finally compare that to a quad box from sun, for approx $34K. None of those are what I would consider commodity. So what is commodity pricing?
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
As their staggering losses continue to mount, I believe its pretty well proven that Sun doesn't belong in the processor design business any longer. They simply can't achieve the volume required to support the massive R&D investments required. Even nifty tech as described, the majority of business applications don't care what processor is running underneath - its all a matter of price/performance. Sun isn't going to win price/performance against intel and AMD.
Now all we need is a simple to learn language built to be compiled for threaded servers, and we're all set!
c l i c k here
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sulli
RTFJ.
ah, the smell of a new computer . ..works better than Viagra?
......nine hours later at the crack of dawn.
"Honey, I need to open this box from Alienware first."
"Honey, I'm done playing counterstrike. We can go to bed now."
"Yeah right. I need to get to work."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
FYI, the server is using a single 500MHz UltraSparc IIe CPU...
So, with the necessary Solaris installed, your existing Tomcat running on your existing JVM will see all the benefits.
Not it won't. At least not so simply. It will see the benefits if there are enough concurrent threads running (as you said), and even that if these are not waiting for each other. So it will work for many clients at once.
I have my doubts that this architecture will help with most real world tasks - even real world server tasks - even with completely blown out of proportion threading like java seems to lead people to.
Let's face it, the reason Intel or IBM are not going into that direction that far are not that they couldn't if they wanted to.
It's more that they still have other tricks in their sleeves to ramp up their processor power, and Sun hasn't - or can't afford them.
For me this is the last desperate attempt from Sun to prolong their relevance in the processor arena.
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.
It's the same thing that's been happening for the last decade. As x86 slowly creeps in on Sun/IBM/Whatever's market, they have to come up with something "bigger".
This is not bigger. Taken to the extreme, this is like if Commodore was still in business and tried to sell computers with 2^32 6502 procs.
Look at the chart in the article to see how desperate Sun is:
They admit that existing Opterons Xeons not only kick the ass of their newest, existing architecture for a single thread, they also concede that even their not-existant future proc won't even be faster for single threaded apps.
Ok, you say, but it is faster for multithreaded apps. The only problem with that is that I bet that a recent multiproc Opteron/Xeon will give the future Sun architecture a run for its money.
And IBM/Intel won't have any problems building multicore procs, if they want. They just don't need to, at the moment.
IOW, looking at this chart one might ask himself why tSun even tries to build processors nowadays.
You're looking at it from the wrong end; the consumer end. Look at it from Sun's end and you may see it a bit differently. Since there is a comparable "commodity" system on the market, Sun would need to drop the price they charge to compete with the commodity system (without changing thier product strategy). Using your prices that would equate to a loss of profits:
$34,000 - $20,000 = $14,000
That's $14,000 that they would lose in profits if they were to compete by matching the price of the commodity system. Depending on the actual costs of making that system, this sort of sacrifice in profits may be very unreasonable for them.
The "commodity" bit merely means that there's a fair number of players in this market for a product competing mostly based on price. It does not necessarily mean that you're going to get your high preformance computer for the same price as your desktop PC.
What part of hyperthreading and "both Intel and IBM are working on other highly parallel processors and AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron." says to you that "Intel or IBM are not going into that direction that far."
It might be just the way I'm reading it but the only difference is that Intel started small (hyperthreading) and still currently rely on several physical processors. IBM's Power already has multiple cores, and this isn't the first time a dual core Opteron was mentioned.
It seems to me that in a manner of speaking Sun is just currently ahead of the pack. Ultra4 is already a dual core, and with the way Solaris handles multiple threads and multiple processors, I doubt its much of a leap to have it perform very well with an 8 core module. They saw that Ultra4 did what it was expected, Solaris worked well, and took the next step and said how far can we take this. I doubt that at the very least Power wont have 4 or 8 cores itself in the future.
I don't see that too many changes would have to be made to Solaris to make some very good use of this processor, so this could be a very good thing for Sun. Just think of apps that are licensed per-processor, and now you have one that you have to pay for that can do the work that several were doing before.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
That's true, but until nio introduced polled IO, the best behaved java developer either had to choose to have rather a lot of threads or have their program crippled by IO waits. So there's a lot of code out there that does make lots of threads (and it's a handy programming paradigm even now, so it's not going away any time soon). As the poster above says, it's only an improvement if you've got lots of threads. So an application server is a prime example - it ends up running _lots_ of servlet instances simultaneously, as it's mostly IO bound (waiting for disks to spin, database servers to respond, xml-messaging backoffice thingies to commune with antique cobol boxes, etc.). This kind of application will really benefit - other stuff (e.g graphics, raw-calculation) largely won't - but stuff like Websphere and Tomcat is exactly what folks buy mid/high end Solaris-SPARC boxes for. As to problems on "non-Windows" environments, you'll find fantastic thread handling on AIX, HP/UX, and Solaris, where tens of thousands of extant threads isn't going to bring the machine to its knees. NT is okay, I don't know about the BSDs. Linux _was_ horrible, but I know a bunch of work has gone into threads recently, both in the library and in 2.6 - I don't know how much better this has made things.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
It's very interesting to think about who these Niagara based servers are going to be targeted for. The nifty IOE feature and integrated ethernet controller seems to guarantee they should be great for telecom purposes. Of course that's a cursed market that Sun is already king of. Niagara based server seem destined to go head-to-head with dual-processor Xeons and Opterons. IT groups building web server farms or clustered databases will have a new option to consider. Either go with cheaper, lower performance Xeons and Opterons running Linux or with fewer, but more expensive Sun Niagaras running Solaris. It's an interesting proposition, and seems like Sun's first real attempt to compete on price/performance. The real x-factor is AMD. If they can really break into the server market, then the Opteron could offer as much performance as the Niagara but at the same (or lower) price as a Xeon.
It's ironic to see how positions have changed. Intel and AMD are developing multi-core CPUs for use in 4+ way systems, while Sun develops a CPU that is SMP incompatible. Of course Sun is also working on Rock, and hoping it can compete with a Xeon as a single cpu, while still scaling for 100 CPU Infernos (or whatever they are going to call them.)
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.
The only way I can see them staying alive is to find a sucker to dump SPARC on and embrace Opteron. If they tie their future to AMD's then AMD might decide to keep their promises. I do not thing it would be very wise to make the same bet on intel. I'm not sure if Solaris has a future but I'm pretty sure that if SPARC does, it won't be Sun driving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"