Fujitsu Announces 16-core SPARC64 IXfx (and the Supercomputer It Powers)

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx processors, which offer a very significant boost in performance over the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor on which they are based and which power the K computer. Each processor has 16 cores and achieves world-class standalone performance levels of 236.5 gigaflops and performance per watt of over 2 gigaflops." Not that K is any slouch.

Comments

Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun was using Fujitsu SPARC64 processors on some of their servers before the buyout. Are there any news on whether Oracle is going to develop new servers with SPARC64 IXfx processors?

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumor from engineer friends is no. They will resell some Fujitsu servers co-branded with Oracle and that's it.
The longer term roadmap is even more grim for SPARC. I still have a SunBlade on my desk that works like brand new, but sadly is about as useful as the SGI under the desk :/

Re:Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

I don't think Oracle is interested in this market. They wanted the subset of Sun hardware that is good for databases and web apps (i.e. the Tx line), but they aren't really interested in being in the general-purpose server market. They want to be able to control the entire stack from the hardware to the applications, and everything in the middle. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that it lets them really tune for performance out of the box. The second, and more important, is that it lets them offer support contracts for the entire machine. If anything goes wrong with it, hardware, operating system, database, or in the business apps, you won't get your in-house IT staff to fix it, you'll just call Oracle. These contracts can be really expensive, and still seem like a good deal compared to keeping a few admins on staff.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Oracle will continue to jointly develop the SPARC64 with Fujitsu. The servers produced today, dubbed the M-series are in fact sold and produced under Oracle logistics -- not Fujitsu. Fujitsu is a reseller of this technology, so if you buy a server from them, you're having it delivered from Oracle. Its Fujitsu who is the reseller. Further updates to the M-series will include moving toward the LDoms technology where there is an expected convergence with the M-series and T-series sometime 2015 according to the road map. I fail to see how this is a "grim" roadmap.

The Fujitsu computer that is the FX10 has been developed outside the Oracle/Fujitsu framework and this is one of the reasons that it doesn't run Solaris. The Oracle agreement does not cover the FX10 framework. The VIIIfx CPU is being fitted in Oracle chassis and boards today and expected to be available shortly. Though there are some difficulties with this chip with respect to power consumption and cooling, but nothing insurmountable. From the little that I know, the IXfx CPU is an extension of the VIIIfx and the jury is still out on whether this chip will indeed be compatible with the VIIIfx chassis. Suffice to say that its generic name in contrast to previous SPARC64 chips, it should be possible to integrate it. However looking at the design specs of the FX10 computer it seems as though a lot of the platform is near die or on die. Thus it could be a special chip which won't be suitable for general purpose computers.

Re:Oracle?

[sleigher]

Right, except have you ever called Oracle support? Had a sev 1 recently. We have 24x7x4 hr call back. Did I get a call back after 4 hours? no. 6 hours? no. 8 hours? no. It was 3 days later we actually got a manager to have a meeting with us to figure out why we can't get support for our hardware. Go ahead, get rid of your staff. Depend on Oracle to help you. That's a great idea. I assure you, you will not regret it.

Pricing would be interesting!

[gentryx]

Fujitsu is fishing in the same waters as IBM does with their BlueGene machines: both lines are designed to deliver 20 PFLOPS and both are traditional systems in the sense that you don't have accelerators like GPUs, which are still awkward to program for the average physicist. Thus, to potential buyers the TCO would be interesting. From what I've heard BlueGene/Q is twice as power efficient as the Sparc VIIIfx design, but those were just 8-cores, not 16-cores.

So, assuming comparable total power consumptions and a affordable price tag, Fujitsu could snatch several deals from big blue, perhaps even the recently failed Blue Waters, although my money is on Cray for that machine.

Re:Breach of Contract

[sleigher]

I would love to. My point is I warned the company to stop buying Sun hardware when the acquisition went through. I knew it was gonna be like this. They are giving us dedicated back line support people we can call directly. I am sure that is sustainable by Oracle as well...

do they sell them at bestbuy?

[Cyko_01]

facebook is so slow these days!

Re:I wish someone would put sparc on the desktop

[TheRaven64]

I have one of Sun's cheap workstations - the Blade 100, which was 100% cheap commodity crap plus an UltraSPARC CPU. The problem is that they don't have anything like the economies of scale required to make cheap chips. If Intel is selling 100 chips for every one that Sun is selling (which is quite optimistic for Sun / Oracle), then the unit cost of the SPARC is going to be a lot bigger, even if the two chips are the same size and made on the same process, just because all of the one-off costs (including R&D) are spread over a much smaller number of chips. A cheap Sun workstation is still likely to be a few hundred dollars more than an equivalent x86 system, even if all of the components other than the CPU are the same, and that limits them to people who really need to be able to develop on SPARC...