Slashdot Mirror
Facebook VP Slams Intel's, AMD's Chip Performance Claims
narramissic writes "In an interview on stage at GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of technical operations, told Om Malik that the latest generations of server processors from Intel and AMD don't deliver the performance gains that 'they're touting in the press.' 'And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is,' Heiliger said. He also had some harsh words for server makers: 'You guys don't get it,' Heiliger said. 'To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.' Heiliger added that Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."
You guys don't get it
Is it possible to take out a massive life insurance policy on Jonathan Heiliger?
To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.
I assure you, despite your misconception that the world revolves around you everyone has those requirements. From the people who build supercomputers right down to the netbook I am typing on while watching Gurren Lagann.
Can we get like a panel of hardware engineers to have a discussion with this guy and can I get some popcorn?
My work here is dung.
Maybe the dude should have benchmarked before committing. How does he scope his projects, with brochures?
POKE 36879,8
To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.
Hm, lets see... perhaps because Facebook and Amazon are niche markets? The average server isn't going to even need all the computing horsepower and the power efficiency is simply a drop in the bucket for most companies electrical bills. The average server is going to be much more I/O intensive than CPU intensive unless you do cluster computing or render a lot of stuff. The average server such as a web server or a file server doesn't use that much CPU and usually you are running 1-3 servers, not the hundreds that Facebook or Amazon would run.
And really, why is a VP complaining about this stuff? That he can't either afford custom solutions or spend the money buying more servers?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have heard from some reliable sources that Facebook and Twitter's backend applications are poorly written.
Are Intel and AMD's claims overblown, sure what hardware manufacter doesn't cherry pick performance claims.
But I don't care what sort of hardware you through at crap code you are always going to get crap performance.
1) Facebook & Amazon need cheap, power efficient systems
2) Intel and AMD aren't measuring up with processors to power these systems
3) However, Google has systems appropriate for this use (presumably using Intel or AMD processors)
If that's his argument, then it would seem that the real conclusion is that Facebook can't build systems as good as Google's, even though they are using the same processor technology.
Its the next logical solution... Those T5440 servers with 256 processing threads are MONSTERS in terms of handling simultaneous connections which make them very good web servers, database servers, and file servers, all of which means they are very good for a company who's product is a website.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Assuming that a solution was properly engineered, this should not have been a surprise.
Cheap. power efficient, performance. Pick two.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
NEWSFLASH! Customer are tightwads.
Performance/Reliability/Price.
Pick any two, Heiliger.
Exactly. All these interpreted languages, even with some special tricks, will have serious scalability issues. At some point you have to look at the application and ask some serious questions.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm bemused that he implies the problems with his servers are due to Intel and AMD no delivering with their chips, yet at the same time he admires google for how good a job they do in building out their machines.
he must be aware that google uses Intel and AMD chips.
his reasoning just doesn't square.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
This isn't just about the CPU, it's about overall system performance.
Despite improvements in CPU performance, memory and IO performance is lagging behind.
A modern SATA drive delivers about 90MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
Some RAID controllers can do about 600-800MB/sec ( peak sequential read ).
An average AM2 ( K10 core 65nm ) gets about 34,849MB/sec L1, 12,169MB/sec L2, 6371MB/sec L3, 2,741MB/sec DDR2-800 5-5-5-12.
Obviously Opterons scale a lot better since they each have an onboard memory controller and additional HT links which greatly increases bandwidth as you add more CPUs. However adding more cores on the same die which have to share a single memory controller can cause starvation.
Another major issue is software parallelization, writing parallel code is still a difficult problem. If your software doesn't parallelize well it doesn't matter if you have 8, 16 or even 32cores on a single die.
If you had an equal number of CPU cores and memory controllers you could achieve much better performance, however your relatively very slow storage subsystems would still be a major bottleneck.
I once did a large project in which I took a large, slow site in PHP (it was pretty complecated, it was a CRM with a lot of custom business logic) and rewrote all the core functionality from PHP to C / C++, and made it a "module" of PHP. The rewriting was mostly simple translation -- litterally removing all dollar signs, adding some types, and attempting to compile, and just fixing the compile errors until it would build. Then going back through it with a fine-tooth comb to track down all the memory leaks.
The speed increase from doing that is pretty surprising. Simple loops that do a bit of math or something speed up by 100 times, and a loop that creates and destroys an object within the loop will be 100,000 times faster. This is without actually trying to write fast C/C++ code, and not create and delete the same thing over and over in a loop -- just pure dumb translation of the code.
At that point, the web site guys can keep tweaking and changing the web page in PHP just like before; but they load that module in the php.ini and then they have a basic library of stuff, like login_user() or get_user_balance() and etc, that are really fast and do all the heavy lifting.
I would be surprised if Facebook has not already done this. How to do it is well documented in several books, and there are lots of PHP modules written in C/C++ to look at for examples.
I suspect that Facebook's VP is right that AMD and Intel exaggerate their claims, but is also generally true that most computer programs are more IO bound that you expect. This is not a reason to avoid something like I describe above; once you have the more complete control of programming in C, IO issues may be easier to find and address.
He also mentions that the servers offered by Dell and others aren't very power efficient or practicle for him, and he mentions Google designing their own servers. Nothing google did was really rocket science, from what we know, and Facebook probably doesn't have to go as far as they did to get a reasonable benefit. It's not that hard to set up motherboards to run without a case, booting off the network with no harddrive attached.
Really? What sort of test was it?
We took a Java application off a E6900 using 35% of 48 1.35Ghz US-IV cores. We put it on a T5240 with 16 1.4Ghz cores we saw it only use 14% of the machine with improved user response time.
We also ran a database benchmark for some tests we were running between some AIX and Linux boxes and threw it against a T5240 running Oracle 11g for comparison. Because it was predominately a single threaded operation it ran slower than the 2.2Ghz Power5 LPAR, but the overall difference was about the same ratio as the difference in clock speeds. The thing to note was the machine was only a few percent utilised, so we could have run another 16 or so instances and coped easily.
These machines are workhorses. Granted, you need the right workload but highly parallel/highly transactional work like java web applications or web serving absolutely fly.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton