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Jonathan Schwartz Shows 32-Way UltraSPARC Chip
Megaslow writes "The latest entry in Jonathan Schwartz's blog has pictures of Sun's Project Niagra chip, with 8 cores * 4 threads per core for a 32-way computer on single chip. He also shows what looks to be a test rig reportedly already up and running Solaris 10."
You know what I'd do if I had one of these?
Two chicks, man.
Game... blouses.
Okay, I am a solaris/sun fan boy. But this sounds like it was crafted by a professional commerical writer...
:)
Ahhh... to be 38 and be this guy. President of Sun at 38 years old... what a life.
This is the silicon for our Project Niagara chip: 8 cores * 4 threads per core = a 32-way computer. On a chip.
And did I mention we have silicon, and not just a JPEG file?
And I saved the best for last. Are you ready?
It's already running Solaris. A volume OS that eats threads for lunch, on the world's most advanced massively parallelized silicon.
That's not just a box.
That's what we call a system. A system built for internet workloads. Not for the expedience of a press release. And a system that gives customers yet more choice, rather than taking choice away.
(And before you ask, yes, we are planning a nicer box when we ship
These guys deserve to Microsoft level of success...
Several of sun gurus have given us suggestions and hints at solaris section of our site. Without their early input and links from within the sun website, we would have never been as successful.
These guys are trying to do things big and correctly.
Schwartz's blog may not be representative of the general corporate attitude at Sun, but he comes across as bitter and even hostile. Perhaps he is just a passionate believer in his company's work, but his whiney tone smacks of unprofessionalism. I'm not particularly well versed on the continuing saga that is Sun, but should not product performance be speaking for itself? In any case, if they have achieved something noteworthy with this "32-way" chip, I hope they figure out a way to make it useful. This MPR Paper on the processor may be of interest to some.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
I'd be all set FOREVER if I could only get 20 of these! I mean...
:-)
640 Processors should be enough for anyone!
Life is short: void the warranty.
Does Johnathan not get it, or is he playing the FUD game? The IBM Open chip is not a chip without an OS. It runs linux...a commodity OS. That means two major things.
1. People who run Linux on a different box may be more likley to upgrade to the Open chip since they won't have to take an OS change into account as well.
2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.
Sun doesn't get it. Or more likley they do, but don't want to help their customers figure it out.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Doesn't mean a damn thing unless software is written to take advantage of it. Damn PC developers can't write software to take advantage of HT (with some exceptions, I know), but hopefully this chip's power can be realized fully.
Why is it that people keep stating that you have to write software that targets HT specifically? This is not true. Any multithreaded application will benefit from it. It is up to the OS to present you with the CPUs, real or virtual.
Yes, there are specific issues with handover during tight spinloops et.c., but only people writing locking or timing code should have to deal with those issues. Not your average application programmer.
Sun has never explained or shown what this Throughput computing is all about. More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it. Pthreads by itself isn't going to hack it. They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.
What will be interesting is how the software market adjusts to these multi-core processors becoming more widespread and popular (particularly with dual-core Opteron on the way). They're going to have to rethink things a bit with regards per-processor licensing. From what I recall, Oracle (and many others) consider a dual-core processor two separate processors, and charge accordingly. Anyone running one of these chips would then get stung for a 8 (or possibly 32) processor license.
Perhaps a better solution would be to adopt the approach taken by IDC (which Sun obviously seem quite happy to back) of counting processor sockets, instead of cores.
Anyone know what other software companies are planning on doing with their per-processor licensing ?
-Mark
After upgrading the Sun server on our network to Solaris 10, all of a sudden the Exchange server stopped working, our Primary Domain Controller went tits up, and the W2K DHCP Server went offline. I've gotten six phone calls in the last 10 minutes from people calling to ask why their workstations say "Welcome to Looking Glass" when they log in. ;)
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It says "Niagra chip", not "Viagra chip".
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
This isn't made for rendering, or for stuff that requires floating point power.
Since the chip has 8 cores, each core is quite simple. This kind of chip is more suited for database and web servers, where there are lot of simultaneous requests, but fullfilling a single request is quite simple task.
You can find more information about Niagara here.
This is a SPARC processor. It runs Solaris. The Solaris kernel is fully pre-emptively muti-threaded. Most of the large applications that you buy a big Solaris box to run are also highly mutlithreaded.
The beauty of this design is that there is already a mature, stable and high-performance industry-standard OS for it (Solaris) along with thousands of applications.
You could even probably run Linux on it if you wanted.
Stick Men
I think they're particularly looking at things like the C10K problem (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html).
The new Solaris 10 networking code reputedly pays a lot of attention to exploiting, and serving threads well, particularly hardware multithreading if it's available.
If they could squeeze one of these and maybe 8GB+ of RAM into a 1U box or into their blade centre, then I think it'd do quite nicely for serving web.
...an Englishman in London.
When I first read the headline, I thought it said "Nigeria" not "Niagra" and all I could think of was what the boot messages would look like....
... ...
I am of great luck that I have found you in my booting time of need.
Before my father passed away he moved 32 MILLION BYTES of CACHE to a daughter board on the pci bus. I have contacted the pci controller, and explained your GRANT request.
I need you to send me a copy of your PID, your UID, your address and your IRQ.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
There's little point in Sun fighting with intel and amd to produce the highest Mhz chip. They can buy opteron's, stick them in boxes and provide a good low to mid-end system.
OTOH Solaris is already REALLY good at multitasking. The system i'm typing this on has almost 5,000 threads, it's at 80% utilization and it's still very responsive.
As you put more tasks onto a single CPU it'll have to burn more and more cycles doing context switches and suffer from register starvation.
Plus large boxes benefit from economies of scale and can have features that aren't practical in smaller ones:
When a CPU fails the system can take that motherboard out of circulation, then the admin can replace it at their convenience. Same for memory and psu's. Usually no downtime.
Plus we already know that it takes less resources to admin a unix machine than a windows box. Now consider a 144 CPU x 32 Core machine. Even IF it could only handle the workload of 500 windows servers the admin costs are slashed further.
Also consider that the cache might be shared, but then consider that all those cores will most likely be running the same application. I'm sure there's lots of code within oracle or java that gets reused frequently by all the processors. An eightcore chip with 16MB of cache will naturally be able to cache much more of the shared resources than 8 cpu's with 2MB cache.