Where IT is
going …
You
may have observed the big trend of the moment : Take your old slide
decks, banners and marketing brochures and try to plug in the word
cloud
as many times as
possible. A current Google search of the words Cloud Computing yield
today more than 31 million results ! Even if you search only on Cloud
(getting 175 Million+
results), the first entry in the list (discounting the Sponsored
results) is this
one. Amazing fashion of the moment !

As we recently
described in this white
paper, there are not one but many clouds. I had recent
conversations on this topic with customers in our Menlo
Park Executive Briefing Center . While they all say that they
will not be able to host their entire IT department in a Public
Cloud. , they are interested in the notion of combining a Public
cloud service with multiple Private Clouds - this is the notion of
Hybrid Cloud.

Private
clouds
The
Sun Solution
Centers and SUN
Professional Services are starting now to build the first private
clouds architectures based on Sun Open Source products. The most
common building block for those is the versatile Sun
Blade 6000. Why ? Because of the capacity of this chassis to host
many different type of CPU’s (x86 & SPARC) and operating systems
(Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris, Solaris or even Vmware
vSphere). At the same time, INTEL and AMD have released two
exceptional chips : the INTEL XEON 5500 (code name Nehalem) and the
six-core AMD Opteron (code name Istanbul). I had the opportunity to
test these chips recently and will give you here a few data points.

Cloud
benchmarks

We may not have today
any Cloud related standard benchmarks. However, if I look at the
different software components of a private cloud, it seems that
Computing capabilities (in integer and floating point) and Memory
Performance are the two key dimensions to explore. You may argue that
your cloud need a database component …but improved caching
mechanism (memcached
for example) and the commoditization of Solid State Disks (see this
market
analysis and also here)
are moving database performance profiles toward memory or cpu
intensive workloads. Additionally, the exceptional power of 10-Gbit
based Hybrid storage appliances (like the Sun
Storage 7410 Unified Storage System) makes us less concerned by
I/O & network bound situations. It is good to know that this new
storage appliances are a key element of our public cloud
infrastructure.

Nehalem &
Istanbul Executive summary

Both AMD & INTEL
had customer investments in mind as their new chips use the same
sockets than before … so they can be used in previously released
chassis. What you will typically have
to do after
upgrading to the new processors is to download the latest platform
BIOS. Another good idea is also to check on your OS level … the
latest OS releases include upgraded libraries and drivers. Those are
critical if performance is near the top of your shopping list. See
here
for example.

For other features,
please refer to the key characteristics below :

Note : For this
test, we used DDR3 1066Mhz.

Now, here is our
hardware list :

Calculation
performance : iGenCPU

iGenCPU is a
calculation benchmark written in Java. It calculates Benoit
Mandelbrot’s fractals using a custom Imaginary
Numbers library. The main benefit of this workload is that it
naturally creates a 50% floating point and 50% integer calculation.
As the number of floating operations produced by commercial software
increase every year, this type of performance profile is getting
closer and closer to what modern web servers (like Apache) and
application servers (like Glassfish) will produce.

Here are the results
(AMD Istanbul in Blue, INTEL Nehalem in Red) :

Observations :

1. Very similar
   peak throughput (984 fractals/s on INTEL, 1008 fractals/s on
   AMD)

   
   

2. The AMD chip
   produce superior throughput at any level of concurrency. At 8
   threads, which is a very common scalability limit for commercial
   virtualization products, it produces 28% more throughput than
   Nehalem.

   
   

3. It shows the
   superiority of the Opteron calculation co-processors as we had
   already observed on previous quad-core generation.

   
   

4. It is more
   important for calculation to have larger L1/L2 cache then faster
   L1/L2 cache. The Opteron micro-architecture is naturally a better
   fit for this workload.

   
   

Memory
performance : iGenRAM

It is a classic brain
exercise when you can not sleep : imagine what you would do with $94
million in your bank account. The iGenRAM benchmark was initially
developed in C to produce an accurate simulation of the California
Lotto winner determination. It is highly memory intensive using
1Gigabyte of memory per thread. Memory allocation time as well as
memory search performance produce a combined throughput number
plotted below :

Observations
:

1. The faster DDR3
   memory and higher frequency of the INTEL chip make it a better fit
   for memory intensive workloads. In peak, the Nehalem based system
   produce 23% more throughput than its competitor.

   
   

2. For a small
   number of threads (1 to 4), both system produce very similar
   numbers.

   
   

3. Second
   level predictor on this repetitive workload most likely help the
   Nehalem-based system to improve its scalability curve tangent past
   four threads
   

   
   

4. As noted, we
   used DDR3 1066Mhz for this Nehalem test. DDR3 1333Mhz is also
   available and will increase the INTEL chip advantage on this
   workload.

   
   

Conclusion

At complex question,
complex answer… As you have noted, these benchmarks show the AMD
Istanbul better suited for calculation intensive workloads but also
show better memory performance of the INTEL Nehalem. Therefore,
different layers within your private cloud will need to be profiled
if you want to determine what is your best choice. And guess which
Operating System comes equipped with the right set of tools (I.e
Dynamic Tracing) to make the determination : Solaris or OpenSolaris .

[Last minute note: I
also performed Oracle 10g database benchmarks on these blades. Maybe
for another article..]

See you next time
in the wonderful world of benchmarking….

Source/Kaynak : http://blogs.sun.com/mrbenchmark/entry/what_processor_will_fuel_your