Sun Blade X6440 Server Module

The Sun Constellation System delivers top performance on a wide range of compute-intensive, memory-intensive, communication-intensive or I/O-intensive applications, allowing customers to grasp performance benefits at every level ranging from a single blade to the Top 500 entries.

Designed for ultimate throughput and density, a fully integrated Sun Blade 6048 chassis can accommodate up to 48 server modules of a given architecture, while providing space and weight savings.

The Sun Blade X6440 server module offers industry-leading performance with extensive memory footprint and superb I/O capacity combined in a very well balanced four-socket platform that leverages the latest Quad- and Six-Core AMD Opteron processors and is capable of delivering up to 12 TFLOPS of peak performance in a fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis.

The Sun Blade 6048 chassis and Sun Fire X6440 server modules provide a robust 48-node building block for clusters of all sizes and demonstrate outstanding scalability on compute-intensive workloads like SPEC CPU2006. Sun's ultimate cluster building block produced two new groundbreaking results:

• The best integer throughput score ever published
• Top x86 floating point throughput result

The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compilers on a variety of real-world compute intensive workloads and consists of two benchmark suites. One suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance and the other measures and compares floating-point performance. For each of these suites, two metrics are collected. One measures how fast the computer completes a single task and the other measures how many tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time (the throughput).

Benchmark Outcome

• The innovative and integrated design of the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, in combination with 48 Sun Blade X6440 server modules (48 nodes with 4 chips/16 cores/16 threads each), produced the record-breaking SPECint_rate_base2006 score of 8840 and the SPECfp_rate_base2006 result of 6500.
• The Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software — Sun's freely available development tool for the Solaris OS and Linux — was instrumental in achieving these outstanding performance results. The latest version of Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software contains new features and enhancements to boost performance and simplify the creation of high-performance parallel applications for the latest multicore x86 and SPARC-based systems running on leading Linux platforms, the Solaris™ Operating System (OS) or OpenSolaris™.
• Sun utilized the freely available community-based version of the OS — OpenSolaris 2008.11, and it's advanced capabilities to land these ground-breaking results.
• The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark provides a broad variety of workloads such as protein sequencing, MPEG-4 decoding, XML processing, structural mechanics and speech recognition.
• Deploying quad-socket, quad-core AMD Opteron-based server modules in conjunction with OpenSolaris OS and the latest bits of compiler software, catapulted the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, to the top position on SPEC's compute-intensive floating point and integer throughput benchmarks.
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 and the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software used to produce this result are available for download free of charge at www.sun.com/download.
• The Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software has set almost a dozen industry benchmark records to date, and was instrumental in landing these new ground-breaking SPEC CPU2006 results.

• Press Release

The SPEC OMP benchmark consists of workloads often used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry and mechanical design, and consists of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer's processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation.

On the very popular medium problem set, the versatile Sun Blade X6440 server module, equipped with four quad-core AMD Opteron model 8384 processors and running the OpenSolaris 2008.11 Operating System (OS) with Sun Studio Express 11/08 compiler software, posted the new x86 World Record. This ground breaking result clearly showcases Sun's commitment to the Open Source movement by utilizing the freely available community-based versions of OS and compiler software that include all the latest features and capabilities.

The Sun Blade X6440 server module (16 cores/4 chips/16 threads) produced a SPECompM2001 result of 35,896, beating previous record score by 4% and highlighting the Sun's software advantage over PathScale compiler tools and SuSE 10 OS. Moreover, compared to the system equipped with the previous generation of AMD Opteron processors, the Sun Blade X6440 server module offers 19% better performance on SPECompM2001 benchmark while consuming 9% less power.

• Press Release