Sun Servers Demonstrate Enterprise and HPC Performance Leadership

Written by Chris Tom

Thursday, 16 October 2008 18:45

Sun Leads Development Efforts on New SPECjvm2008 and SPECmail2008 Benchmarks, Sets Bar With Solaris-Powered Results on Prominent Benchmarks SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced five new world record results on industry-standard benchmarks using x64 servers based on Intel(R) Xeon(R) and AMD Opteron(TM) architectures, powered by the Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS) and Linux. Sun is setting the bar by posting the first-ever submissions on two new benchmarks from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) - SPECjvm2008 and SPECmail2008, as well as record-breaking results on SPECfp2006, ABAQUS and Fluent application benchmarks for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. Sun also debuted a new benchmark web site designed to offer a gateway for customers to access more than 350 industry-leading and world-record results, pertinent blogs, customer success stories and other technical information in a single location. More information is available at: http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/. Today's announcement reinforces the exemplary performance and overall value of Sun's systems from the edge of the network to heart of the enterprise, and highlights Sun's continued commitment to helping customers accurately evaluate system and software performance via industry-standard benchmark results. Sun continues to invest engineering resources in benchmark development and testing which in turn gives customers the tools to easily assess their compute needs, size their deployments and compare performance across solutions. Sun Brings Performance Leadership, Server Expertise to New SPECjvm and SPECmail Benchmarks Sun played a key role in the development of the new SPECmail2008 and SPECjvm2008 benchmarks and is the first server vendor to post results on the new tests. The updated SPECmail2008 benchmark adds the ability to test email servers that are processing requests, using IMAP4, the prevalent Internet protocol for enterprise mail servers while the SPECjvm2008 benchmark now supports both client and server workloads, multi-core environments and has the needed workload complexity and memory usage to stress contemporary computer systems. Not only will these new industry-leading benchmarks allow companies to help ensure their production environments provide the desired quality of service, but they will also aid in comparing the performance of a particular solution across various systems. • SPECjvm2008: Sun inaugurated the new benchmark by publishing a record-breaking result on the Sun Fire X4450 TM) server with Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad-core processors. Recently Sun increased performance and posted even stronger results by using the newest Intel CPUs with six cores(1). SPECjvm2008 (Java Virtual Machine Benchmark) is a new benchmark suite for measuring the performance of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE), containing several real-life applications and benchmarks focusing on core Java functionality. The SPECjvm2008 workload mimics a variety of common general purpose Java(TM) applications. Fundamentally, this multi-threaded Java benchmark allows customers to make comparisons based on a credible, broad collection of real-world applications that represent various workloads, while taking into account the performance of the operating system and the underlying hardware in the context of executing the JRE. • SPECmail2008: In this record-breaking submission, Sun showcases a complete mail server solution based on the Sun Fire(TM) X4200 M2 server, powered by two AMD Opteron processors Model 2220, the Solaris 10 OS, and the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2, a component of the Sun Java(TM) Communications Suite(2). This result demonstrates the ability of Sun's solution to support a large enterprise-level mail server environment with a single physical Sun Fire server and enterprise-class Sun StorageTek(TM) 2540 arrays, while maintaining the highest level of throughput. The SPECmail2008 benchmark is an industry-standard test designed to measure the performance of corporate e-mail servers on real-world workloads that simulate the typical activities of mail servers operating in a corporate environment. Sun Sets New World Records on HPC Benchmarks Sun set new industry high marks with record breaking results with FLUENT and ABAQUS software packages. FLUENT, heavily used in the automotive, aerospace and consumer products industries, solves fluid flow problems and is based on a numerical technique called computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The ABAQUS/Explicit benchmark suite includes a combination of six high-speed dynamic impact events like a car crash, and quasi-static events with complicated contact conditions like forming a part out of a blank metal sheet. • FLUENT: Sun's top performing cluster consisting of eight Sun Fire(TM) X2250 servers equipped with Intel Xeon E5272 processors running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10, beat all other competitive results in the same category including those posted by HP and SGI(3). • ABAQUS/Explicit: A cluster of four Sun Fire X2250 servers demonstrated ground-breaking performance for systems with up to 16 CPUs on the ABAQUS/Explicit benchmark, a finite element analysis package that is intended to provide performance estimates for running representative ABAQUS analysis jobs on different computer platforms(4). This result also spotlights the high performance Lustre(TM) file system that boosted the cluster's overall performance by lowering access times to files shared by all nodes. Deploying shared file systems in clustered environments with large datasets often result in an additional performance boost as evidenced by the 25 percent faster performance of the Sun Fire X2250 compared to the HP DL160 G5 system using the same Intel processors. • SPECfp2006: Sun recently pioneered the first-ever SPECfp2006 benchmark submission using the OpenSolaris(TM) OS. Today Sun is posting a world record floating point result surpassing the performance of all x86 systems(5). This result used OpenSolaris, along with Sun(TM) Studio compilers to provide developers and small businesses with the means of deploying Sun software quickly and easily. For more details on these and hundreds of other Sun benchmarks, please visit Sun's new benchmark web page: http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/. About Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer"(TM) -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, Solaris, Java, OpenSolaris, Lustre, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron and combinations thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Intel is a trademark or registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. SPEC, SPECfp, SPECmail, SPECjvm are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of October 15, 2008 from www.spec.org. (1) Sun Fire X4450 (16 cores, 4 chips) - 260.08 SPECjvm2008 Base ops/m. Sun Fire X4450 (24 cores, 4 chips) - 260.08 SPECjvm2008 Base ops/m - 283.79 (2) Sun Fire X4200 M2 (4 cores, 2 chip) - 2500 SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users at SPECmail2008 12,019 Sessions/hour. (3) As of 10/10/2008, based on results posted here: http://www.fluent.com/software/fluent/fl6bench/fl6bench_6.3/ (4) As of 10/10/2008, based on results posted here: http://www.simulia.com/support/v67/v67_performance.html (5) Sun Fire X2250 (Intel Xeon X5482 8 cores/2 chips, OpenSolaris) SPECfp2006 27.8. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites