The Oracle Sun Fire X4470 Server, equipped with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors capable of running OpenMP applications with 64 compute threads, delivered outstanding performance on the both medium and large suites of the industry-standard SPEC OMP2001 benchmark. The results are reported in the Sun BestPerf blog Sun Fire X4470 Sets World Records on SPEC OMP2001 Benchmarks.

The X4470, running the Oracle Solaris 10 10/09 operating system with Oracle Solaris Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software, produced the top x86 result on both the SPECompM2001 and the SPECompL2001.

Both the SPEC OMPM2001 Benchmark Suite and the SPEC OMPL2001 Benchmark Suite test HPC performance using OpenMP for parallelism. The first suite employs 11 programs (3 in C and 8 in Fortran) parallelized using OpenMP API; the second employs 9 programs (2 in C and 7 in Fortran) parallelized using OpenMP API

The goals of both suites are identical:

• Targeted to mid-range (4-32 processor) parallel systems
• Run rules, tools and reporting similar to SPEC CPU2006
• Programs representative of HPC and Scientific Applications

Additional details of the benchmarking exercise include:

• The Sun Fire X4470 server, though it uses half the number of OpenMP threads compared to the IBM Power 750, nevertheless beat the IBM Power 750 Express POWER7 3.55 GHz SPECompM2001 score by 14.

• The Sun Fire X4470 server with four Intel Xeon 7560 processors, running 64 OpenMP threads, achieved SPEC OMP2001 results of 118,264 SPECompM2001 and 642,479 SPECompL2001.

• The Sun Fire X4470 server produced better SPECompL2001 results than Cisco (UCS C460 M1) and Intel (QSSC-S4R) even though they all three servers used the same number of Intel Xeon X7560 processors.

• The Sun Fire X4470 server produced better SPECompM2001 results than Cisco (UCS C460 M1), SGI (Altix UV 10) and Intel (QSSC-S4R) even though all three servers used the same number of Intel Xeon X7560 processors.

On another benchmark, the SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark, the Sun Fire X4470 Server also delivered record setting performance. This benchmark measures:

• "Speed": single copy performance of chip, memory, compiler
• "Rate": multiple copy (throughput)

The rate metrics are used for the throughput-oriented systems tested here include:

• SPECint_rate2006: throughput for 12 integer benchmarks derived from real applications such as perl, gcc, XML processing, and pathfinding

• SPECfp_rate2006: throughput for 17 floating point benchmarks derived from real applications, including chemistry, physics, genetics, and weather.

The Sun BestPerf blog that reports these results -- Sun Fire X4470 Sets World Record on SPEC CPU2006 Rate Benchmark, notes that the Oracle Sun Fire X4470 server delivered a world record SPECint_rate2006 result for all x86 systems with 4 chips. The competition included the HP DL585 G7; Cisco UCS C460 M1; Dell R815; IBM x3850 X5; and the Sun Fire X4640.

The Sun Fire X4470 Server set yet another world record, this time on the SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark, as reported in the Sun BestPerf blog of June 28, 2010.

Here, two of Oracle's Sun Fire X4470 servers ran the SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) Sales and Distribution – Parallel (SD-Parallel) standard application benchmark, to deliver a world record result. This was run using Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle 11g Real Application Clusters (RAC) software.

The results follow:

• The Sun Fire X4470 servers result of 21,000 users delivered more than twice the performance of the IBM System x3850 X5 system result of 10,450 users.

• The Sun Fire X4470 servers result of 21,000 users beat the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 system result of 18,180 users. Both solutions used 8 Intel Xeon X7560 processors.

• The Sun Fire X4470 servers result of 21,000 users beat the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 1800E system result of 16,000 users. Both solutions used 8 Intel Xeon X7560 processors.

The blog concludes that the results show how a complete software and hardware solution from Oracle, using Oracle RAC, Oracle Solaris and along with Oracle's Sun servers, can provide a superior performing solution when compared to the competition.

More Information

Architecture and Performance Documentation Released on New Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems

Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems Launched [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter