Several knowledgeable hands at Sun have collaborated in preparing the Sun BluePrints Online document The Solaris Operating System Optimized for the AMD Opteron Processor (Login or registration required). The authors state their intention was to create a quick reference guide for developers and system administrators who want to optimize applications running on Solaris and AMD Opteron processors. The paper describes technical details about specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris ecosystem to make the best use of multicore AMD Opteron processors. To help developers and administrators determine which sections of this paper are most relevant for their needs, the authors present a brief summary of each chapter.

The topics:

The Solaris Ecosystem

• Scalable Multicore Performance: Overview; Optimized for Multicore Processors; AMD HyperTransport Technology; NUMA; Performance Event Counters on Solaris

Power Management

• Power Aware Dispatcher

Reliability and Availability

• Fast Reboot

Java Technology Optimization

Virtualization

• Overview

Developer Tools Optimizations

• Sun Studio Overview; Sun Studio Compiler Optimization Flags; Improved Microvectorization and Automatic Parallelization; Instruction Selection; OpenMP Development with Sun Studio

Record-setting Benchmarks

• Performance Improvements; Best Integer Throughput and Top x86 Floating Point Throughput Results; World Record Price/performance on 3000 GB TPC-H Benchmark; World Record Performance on 30000 GB TPC-H Benchmark; Leading Eight-Processor Server on Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD)

Standard Application Benchmark

• First Large-scale Grid Validation for the SAS Business Analytics Framework; Additional Information and Current Benchmark Results from Sun and AMD

The authors note that recent development projects between Sun and AMD are focused on ways to improve system performance for multicore, multithreaded architectures, enhancing virtualization capabilities, and delivering new power management features. Specifically, AMD and Sun are now working together to optimize the Solaris OS to take advantage of features found in AMD’s latest 45nm six-core AMD Opteron Processor (code named "Istanbul"), which provides up to six processor cores on a single chip. AMD Opteron processors work with a full spectrum of Sun software, including Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, Sun Studio software tools, MySQL database, and Java technology.

Sun and AMD engineering are continuing to work toward:

• Improving performance of the Solaris OS by taking advantage of AMD multicore processor capabilities and AMD NUMA topology.

• Increasing power efficiency by enabling the Solaris OS to take advantage of the AMD Opteron ‘AMD-P’ performance-enhanced dynamic power management capabilities.

• Optimizing utilization of AMD Direct Connect Architecture and AMD HyperTransport Technology for the fastest possible communication among processing units, including AMD’s newly introduced HT Assist.

• Extending Predictive Self Healing capabilities by incorporating AMD Opteron features into the Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA) for improved system reliability.

• Implementation of AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) features in the Solaris OS and the Sun xVM virtualization portfolio, resulting in enhanced virtualization capabilities on AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

More Information

Solaris and OpenSolaris Operating Systems

Sun server offerings based on AMD processors

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems based on AMD Opteron processors

The Solaris Operating System on AMD Opteron Processors [...read more...]

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