Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, equipped with 64 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII processors and running the Solaris 10 10/09 OS, posted the best single system UNIX(R) result on the SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006 benchmarks.

SPEC CPU2006 is a CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler. SPEC designed CPU2006 to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance using workloads developed from actual end-user applications. The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite is made up of two sets of benchmarks, the first one simulates integer-intensive workloads and the second one simulates floating point-intensive workloads. Each benchmark set has two different metrics. The Speed metric captures execution of the benchmark workload using a single thread. The Rate gauges the throughput of a system by measuring how many workload streams can be run simultaneously and demonstrates how fast a system can complete the specified workload. Rate is further defined by Base and Optimized runs. Base uses the same compiler flags for all kernels, while Optimized runs use different compiler flags for each kernel. Results are compared against a baseline system run that was standardized by SPEC.

Benchmark Outcome

• The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, utilized the latest versions of Solaris 10 10/09 OS and Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software to produce a SPECint_rate_base2006 score of 2,400, the new single-system UNIX world record result.
• The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, beat the best published SPECint_rate_base2006 result posted by POWER6-based IBM p595 server running UNIX by 32 percent.
• The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running 64 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII processors demonstrated 15 percent improvement over its previously posted SPECint_rate_base2006 result of 2,088 achieved with 2.52 GHz CPUs.
• The new top-of-the-line SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running Solaris 10 10/09 OS and Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software also produced a single system UNIX world record on the SPECfp_rate_base2006 benchmark.
• The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server beat the best published SPECfp_rate_base2006 result of 1,820 posted by top-of-the-line 5.0 GHz POWER6-based IBM Power 595 server running UNIX.

• Press Release

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (32 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads), delivered a new world record result on the two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark with 17,430 SAP SD Benchmark users for all systems running the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode).

SAP is one of the world's premiere ERP application providers, and maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on various SAP products. The SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that represents order-processing and invoice-processing workloads, while also demonstrating the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system.

Benchmark Outcome

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 with 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII+ processors (32 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads) supported 17,430 SD users using SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark . This new benchmark complements the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server's standing world record result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark with SAP ERP 6.0 and is the first published Unicode result on an enterprise-class system.
• Competitors, including IBM and HP, have not published two-tier SAP SD Unicode benchmark results on their enterprise-class systems, making the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, Oracle(R) Database and Solaris 10 OS used in the new benchmark an extremely attractive solution for customers seeking unparalleled scalability and unmatched application performance. Moreover, as of today, IBM has not been able to demonstrate any SAP SD performance number on a mainframe system, making Sun's platform even more attractive for Enterprise customers.
• This result highlights the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server's performance leadership at the high-end of the SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark and underscores the optimal performance of SAP ERP running on SPARC64 systems with the Solaris OS regardless of the encoding methodology used in the application.
• In January 2009, SAP released a new version of the two-tier Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark for SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) software. The new version has higher CPU requirements that result in 25-50 percent fewer supported users compared to the previous two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 (non-Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark. Ten to30 percent of this performance impact is due to the Unicode encoding that introduces overhead for processing of the larger character strings. SAP has issued the following note covering this issue: On January 1, 2009, the SAP SD Benchmark was updated. Alongside the upgrade to SAP Business Suite 7 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0, a number of additional, necessary updates were implemented. Business changes constantly, for example, Unicode and the use of the new general ledger are now common practice for SAP customers across all industries, and the SAP standard application benchmarks need to reflect this change. The updates are transparent; that is, the steps of the benchmark scenario remain unchanged. Please be aware that these changes make the SD benchmark more resource-intensive, which has a direct impact on the benchmark results.
• Unicode is a computing standard that allows the representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Before the Unicode requirement, this benchmark used ASCII characters, meaning each was just one byte. The new version of the benchmark requires Unicode characters and the Application layer (where ~90 percent of the cycles in this benchmark are spent) uses a new encoding, UTF-16, which uses two bytes to encode most characters (including all ASCII characters) and four bytes for some others. This requires computers to do more computation and use more bandwidth and storage for most character strings.
• This result highlights the optimal performance of Unicode-based SAP ERP applications on Sun SPARC Enterprise servers running the Solaris Operating System (OS). Unicode enables seamless multilingual support when running various SAP applications and requires a different version of the software. Sun has pioneered the usage of Unicode-based SAP software in several benchmark publications to date and has gained significant expertise in lowering the additional resource consumption normally associated with Unicode software.

• Press Release

The SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, equipped with 64 SPARC64 VI processors, delivered a breakthrough world records on both on-line and off-line versions of LHS BSCS iX Release 2 billing benchmark.

Benchmark Description

LHS, a leading provider of telecom billing and customer care systems worldwide, uses a fully convergent billing and customer care system, BSCS iX, to deliver a unified billing view to the customer, integrating all services provided into a single-point of customer care. LHS and SUN have been cooperating for more than 10 years to deliver and continuously improve high-performance business support solutions that provide communications providers with powerful solutions to meet their business challenges, maintain growth while protecting margins.

The BSCS iX architecture with its parallel processing capabilities was able to take full advantage of the massive compute performance offered by the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server.

Benchmark Outcome

• During off-line tests, Sun's server, running the Solaris OS, generated the best-ever-reported result of 1.89 million invoices per hour in off-line mode. Additionally, BSCS iX Release 2 software running on top of the Solaris 10 OS was able to create 846,000 bills per hour in PDF format or 2.1 million bills per hour in XML format. In addition to surpassing the 64 CPU HP Integrity Superdome system by 19 percent, Sun's high performance server demonstrates the ability to efficiently support telecommunication service providers' operations with a base of 60 million customers.
• During on-line testing, Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, divided into two equal hardware partitions, hosted a fully redundant deployment of BSCS iX Release 2 with BSCS master and hot-standby nodes that were able to support 15.66 million prepaid and postpaid calls per hour.
• These results prove that SPARC Enterprise servers deliver excellent performance and demonstrate unprecedented scalability in production-like environments running large scale billing applications.

• Press Release

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server achieved an extraordinary throughput of 2290 on SPECint_rate2006 benchmark, outperforming the IBM Power 595 server by 10%.

Benchmark Description

SPEC CPU2006 is a CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler. SPEC designed CPU2006 to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance using workloads developed from actual end-user applications.

The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite is made up of two sets of benchmarks, the first one simulates integer-intensive workloads and the second one simulates floating point-intensive workloads. Each benchmark set has two different metrics. The Rate gauges the throughput of a system by measuring how many workload streams can be ran simultaneously and demonstrates how fast a system can complete the specified workload. Typically the number of streams corresponds to the number of processors in the system, producing Optimized and/or Base set of results.

Benchmark Outcome [1]

• Sun's flagship commercial server, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, equipped with SPARC64 VII 2.52GHz quad-processors, delivered results of 2290 SPECint_rate2006.
• The top-of-the-line Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server powered by the SPARC64 VII 2.52GHz quad processor beats the top-of-the-line 5.0GHz POWER6-based IBM Power 595 server by 10% on SPECint_rate2006 benchmark.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, equipped with 64 quad-core SPARC64 VII processors running at 2.52GHz, and running Sun Studio 12 software on the top of Solaris 10 OS, delivered a score of 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack's Highly Parallel Computing benchmark. This achievement of over 2 Trillions of floating point operations per second is the highest ever score achieved by a stand alone commercial server.

Benchmark Description

The Linpack benchmark solves a dense system of linear equation, allowing the user to scale the size of the problem and to optimize the software in order to achieve the best performance of a given machine. This benchmark is a highly parallel test designed to measure how fast a computer system can solve linear equations, a common task in engineering and scientific applications.

Benchmark Outcome [1]

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperforms by nearly 2X the best published result of 1028.0 GFLOPS posted by IBM Power 595 POWER6 (POWER6@5.0GHz, 32 processors, 64 cores) and beats the HP Integrity Superdome result of 745.5 GFLOPS (Itanium2@1.6GHz, 64 processors, 128 cores) system by 2.7X.
• The architectural improvements of the new SPARC64 VII processors incorporated into the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, boosted the performance by nearly 2X when compared to the previous generation.

Benchmark Description

The SPEC OMP2001 benchmark is an industry-standard test based on 11 High Performance computing applications. It is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers and represents a collection of applications that are used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry, mechanical design and several other areas, and consists of Medium and Large problem sets. All C/C++ and FORTRAN applications in this suite use the OpenMP programming model that provides a portable, scalable model for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from the desktop to the supercomputer. The OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran on all architectures, from the largest multi-socket servers to the smallest platforms.

Benchmark Outcome [1]

• On the Large problem set, which was designed for measuring and comparing 8 through 128 processor systems, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server equipped with 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered a SPECompL2001 result of 1,456,653.
• The benchmark result by Sun's flagship server, which was running 64 quad-core CPUs, pushed the software stack scalability to an unprecedented level, as demonstrated by the freely available Sun Studio 12 software running on top of the Solaris 10 OS - the most advanced Operating System in the world.
• Additionally, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server posted an outstanding SPECompLbase2001 score of 1,250,890. The "base" scores are produced using less optimized benchmark binaries that were compiled under stricter guidelines. Although "base" scores may not reflect the ultimate performance of the system, some end users, who prefer to spend less time tuning their compiler optimizations, may find them more appealing.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors beat the best posted IBM p 570 result by 38% on the SPECompL2001 benchmark.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors bested the SGI Altix 4700 system equipped with the same number of Itanium2 cores, by 45% on the SPECompL2001 benchmark.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running Solaris 10 OS, SAP ERP 6.0 and Oracle Database Server 10g achieved 39,100 SAP SD users on an industry standard measure of ERP performance the SAP 2-tier Sales and Distribution benchmark.

Benchmark Description

The SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that represents full business workloads of order processing and invoice processing, while demonstrating the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments.

SAP is one of the premier worldwide ERP application providers, and maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on the various SAP products.

Benchmark Outcome [1]

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server produced the highest 2-tier SAP SD result ever recorded, surpassing all IBM and HP Unix systems. Moreover, as of today, IBM has not been able to demonstrate any SAP SD performance number on a mainframe system, making Sun's platform even more attractive for Enterprise customers.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server sets a World Record for the SAP 2-tier SD Benchmark by supporting 39,100 SAP SD 2-tier users completing business transactions that involve: creating the order, creating a delivery note for the order, displaying the order, changing the delivery, posting a goods issue, listing orders and creating an invoice.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (64 processors, 256 cores, 512 threads), supporting 39,100 users, beats the IBM p595 Power6 server with 35,400 SD users by over 10% and outperforms the HP Integrity Superdome SD64B server with 30,000 SD users by 30%.
• The 64-way Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with the 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII processor demonstrated a 56% performance improvement over the previous generation based on the 2.4GHz SPARC VI processor.
• Sun's superior results on this benchmark demonstrate the ability to run both the application and database software in a highly scalable and reliable way using the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with Oracle 10g Database software running the Solaris 10 Operating System, the most reliable OS in the industry.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running Solaris 10 OS, SAP ERP 6.0 and Oracle Database 10g achieved 25,130 SAP SD users on an industry standard measure of ERP performance the SAP 2-tier Sales and Distribution benchmark.

Benchmark Description

The SAP Standard Application SD (Sales and Distribution) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that represents full business workloads of order processing and invoice processing, while demonstrating the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments.

SAP is one of the premier world-wide ERP application providers, and maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on the various SAP products.

Benchmark Outcome [1]

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server supported 25,130 SAP SD users completing business transactions that involve: creating the order, creating a delivery note for the order, displaying the order, changing the delivery, posting a goods issue, listing orders and creating an invoice. Compared to the 23,456 SAP SD users supported by the IBM System p5 595, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server is 7% better.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server achieved a throughput of 7.7 million dialog steps, an equivalent to over 2.5 million fully processed business order line items per hour. This represents a 10% advantage over the throughput of IBM System p5 595 that yielded a throughput of 7 million dialog steps.
• Sun's superior results on this benchmark demonstrate the ability to run both the application and database software in the highly scalable and reliable way using the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with Oracle 10g Database software running on the top of Solaris 10, the most reliable OS in the industry.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has achieved a new single-system performance world record on the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark at the 1 Terabyte scale factor, demonstrating the effectiveness of Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running Oracle 11g database on the SPARC-based platform.

The TPC-H is a performance benchmark established by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) to demonstrate Data Warehousing/Decision Support Systems (DSS). TPC-H measurements are produced for customers to evaluate the performance of various DSS systems. The benchmark measures high-load multiple query throughput as well as single query performance.

Sun's leading TPC-H benchmark utilized 2.4 GHz SPARC64 VI processor-based Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with Sun StorageTek 2540 arrays, running Solaris 10 OS and Oracle Database 11g with Automatic Storage Management.

Using the same number of cores, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperformed the best competing single system result, posted by the HP Integrity Superdome, by 69% with 18% advantage on price/performance [1].

Demonstrating superior I/O throughput when coupled with Solaris OS and Oracle Database 11g database software, Sun's solution relied on twenty Sun StorageTek 2540 disk arrays to deliver data rates of 13 GB/sec with near linear scaling [2].

These achievements clearly demonstrate the performance leadership of large SMP SPARC-based systems in the most demanding Enterprise application environments.

• Benchmark Results

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000, using Sun Studio 12, topped the 1 TFLOP barrier, delivering a score of 1.032 TFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark (Highly Parallel Computing). This out-performs the best published single system from IBM p5 595 (1.9GHz POWER5) by over 2X and tops the high end single system Itanium 2 based box from HP (Superdome, by nearly 38%). [1]

• Benchmark Results

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 with 2.4GHz SPARC64 VI processors set a World Record on the SPECompL2001 benchmark with a score of 1230446. This beats the best IBM result on SPECompL2001 by 16% and the best Itanium 2 based result (from SGI) on SPECompL2001 by 22%. [1]

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 beat the highest performing IBM p5 595 by over 20% and the HP Integrity Superdome by over 45% on the Stream COPY benchmark. [1]