Scale More with Less

The new network economy is turning IT into a strategic business arm of nearly every educational institution. Campus IT administrators are moving more and more traditional back-office systems to the Web and implementing always-on Web services for students, faculty, and alumni.

Unfortunately, this can increase the load on the campus IT infrastructure by 20 percent or more each year. The huge growth in throughput loads has created an unending demand for servers that can scale to meet that demand — and still operate efficiently to hold costs to a reasonable level and minimize environmental impact.

Meanwhile, researchers are using high-performance computing (HPC) to solve highly complex problems, perform research and analysis, and run compute-intensive workloads faster and more efficiently. They also need ever-increasing amounts of compute power, often with less budget.

Two new servers from Sun meet the challenge faced by campus IT administrators and researchers to do more with less. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers take third-generation CoolThreads chip multithreading technology to the next level to deliver unsurpassed throughput in an economical and ecologically efficient way.

These powerhouse systems deliver up to five times the performance — and up to 2.5 times the performance per watt — in half the space of competitive systems, at about one-third the cost.

Delivering More with Less

Over the past two and a half years, the performance of Sun CMT systems has increased five-fold from generation to generation, while maintaining the same footprint and providing significant improvements in power efficiency and price/performance.

The first dual-socket servers powered by the third-generation UltraSPARC T2 Plus "system on a chip" processor, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers can help institutions consolidate datacenters into ultra-dense, energy-efficient environments.

The servers feature up to 128 compute threads in compact one- or two-rack units and two to four times more memory and internal disk capacity than competitive x86 systems. They deliver up to 16 times higher compute density than competitive two-socket x86 systems and up to 32 times higher compute density per rack than competitive four-socket x86 systems.

On a wide range of applications — Java technology, SAP, Oracle, Domino, and others — these servers have the highest-ever levels of throughput in dual-socket designs. They beat all x86 systems on enterprise-class applications including Java, ERP, mail and OLTP databases, helping educational institutions to deliver higher performance services and HPC at lower cost.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers also offer the industry's only open source, no-cost virtualization technologies with Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms). By allowing up to 128 virtual servers per system, these technologies allow campus IT administrators to deploy 5120 isolated domains per rack — making the new servers ideal for virtualization and consolidation.

On-chip, integrated PCI-E and cryptographic acceleration coupled with the high reliability of the server design and the Solaris 10 OS help customers run a highly utilized virtualized infrastructure. Cool Tools for development, tuning, debugging, and optimizing applications running on CoolThreads servers are available for free download.

Servers Based on 'System on a Chip' UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor

Powered by the new multi-socket-capable UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor, the new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers are designed to handle the massive throughput demands of Web 2.0 services and enterprise and HPC applications. When combined with the Solaris OS, MySQL, Glassfish, and developer tools and services, these CoolThreads-based servers enable campus IT administrators to rapidly deploy high-availability Web 2.0 and enterprise services.

"Sun is blending the performance and scalability of traditional mid-range servers with the proven economies and efficiencies of open source chip multithreading technology," says John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun systems group. "These groundbreaking new servers allow you to scale instantly using less resources, which means you can get new network services running far more quickly and at significantly reduced cost."

UltraSPARC Teams Up with Solaris

When teamed with the multithreaded Solaris 10 OS, each UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor can run 64 simultaneous processes, with up to two processors installed into a single space- and power-efficient system, and appear to Solaris as 128 separate computers. Software investments are protected because Solaris 8 and 9 applications run unchanged on Solaris 10 on these servers.

"Compared to x86 systems, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server provides up to five times the performance in less than half the space with pricing at up to one-third less," says Fowler.

These new systems can also have two to four times the memory and local disk capacity, so they can grow as computing requirements do, without requiring campus IT administrators to rip and replace. On-chip encryption and on-board 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology also efficiently support datacenter virtualization and consolidation.

"The compact form factors and world-record throughput of these new Sun servers give administrators a path to compressed datacenters without trade-offs," says Nancy Riley, senior product manager, T5140 and T5240 servers.

For example, the T5240 delivers over two times the performance with three times the performance per watt in half the space than comparable x86 systems. Riley adds that Sun's virtualization software adds to the performance potential of these new servers.

Sun also offers services for installation, virtualization and consolidation, and Solaris 10 OS upgrades, as well as Sun Spectrum support with coverage for the hardware and operating system.

New Sun Servers Handle Toughest HPC Applications

Researchers around the world are finding that the new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers help them meet the most demanding HPC requirements.

The University of California at Berkeley has been using Sun CMT systems since Sun released the first "Niagara" products in late 2005. The 2007 release of the UltraSPARC T2 processor, with its greatly enhanced floating point capability, let the university extend CMT to its most challenging HPC codes. The university has since extended that work to Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers, taking advantage of the multi-socket architecture to scale performance and throughput.

"We have seen great results scaling from 64 threads in the UltraSPARC T2 servers to 128 threads in the UltraSPARC T2 Plus servers for our plasma physics and PDE codes, and from our sparse iterative kernel," says Samuel Webb Williams, a Ph.D. candidate in U.C. Berkeley's Computer Science Division. "In addition, this scaling came at no cost to productivity. In fact, we were able to scale without even recompiling the code. For our applications, CMT technology is by far the most productive solution to achieving high performance."

At the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg's Regional Computing Center Erlangen (RRZE), researchers performing extensive testing with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server and the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor architecture achieved exceptionally high throughput and scalability on computational fluid dynamic applications without having to reoptimize any code.

"When power, space, and administrative savings are considered, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server offers exceptional value to any organization needing maximum compute throughput and bandwidth in highly dense, power-efficient packaging," says Dr. Georg Hager, HPC researcher at RRZE. "We have characterized the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and systems to be an 'IBM BlueGene on a chip' and believe Sun's CoolThreads technology to be a glimpse of what is to come in the commodity HPC market."

'A Hugely Versatile and Reliable Platform'

California's San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) successfully tested the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 running Solaris 10 across a 4 Gigabit Fibre channel SAN with Solaris ZFS and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet HPC infrastructure, allowing the SDSC to place the T5240 strategically within the HPC topology to save power and reduce TCO.

"We ran the server continuously for four months, and encountered zero downtime," says Dan Thorp of the SDSC production systems staff. "We found the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server to be a hugely versatile and reliable platform for our datacenter. The throughput delivered to our expanding Web services and portal applications was impressive. Our conclusion is that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server is an effective replacement for more traditional mid-range SMP platforms and opens up new opportunities within HPC constellations."

After several staff members and researchers at the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) in Ontario, Canada, tested their codes with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server, the lab installed 78 of the systems to help meet the growing needs of the lab's user base. With approximately 10,000 threads available, the HPCVL cluster is first massively chip multithreaded installation in Canada.

"Using the capacity provided through this multithreading model, researchers will get more work done," says Dr. Ken Edgecombe, HPCVL executive director. "This is a paradigm shift in how you think of doing your computations. Each thread is not a CPU core, unlike in the past, but a process that shares the same core with up to seven other threads. Although the individual threads may not be as fast as on some single-threaded processors, the ability to scale gives the throughput that makes the T5140 server a great investment."