Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 22, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
The Test
Testing the Sun Fire V40z is not something that we can easily reference, since the server configurations that we have in our review portfolio are generally Windows based or in a dual configuration. Our quad processor database analysis from early last year goes into specific detail about database performance analysis, and Jason's Opteron 252 article from a week ago adds more depth to that data. Johan wrote a very thorough article detailing some of the differences between various database benchmarks, and we will be using some of his analysis procedure from the Sun Fire V20z benchmarked as well.To give a baseline performance in our benchmarks, we took some data from our Sun W2100z analysis.
| Test Configurations | ||
| Machine: | Sun W2100z | Sun Fire V40z |
| Processor(s): | (2) AMD Opteron 250 | (4) AMD Opteron 850 |
| RAM: | 4 x 1024MB PC-3200 | 8 x 1024MB PC-2700 |
| Hard Drives: | SCSI u320 Seagate Cheetah 10,000RPM | SCSI u320 Seagate Cheetah 10,000RPM |
| Memory Timings: | Default | |
| Operating System(s): | SuSE 9.1 Professional RedHat 9 JDS 2.0 |
RedHat 9 |
| Kernel: | Linux 2.6.8 Linux 2.4 (JDS 2.0) |
Linux 2.4.21 |
| Compiler: | linux:~ # gcc -v Reading specs from /usr/local/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.2/specs Configured with: ./configure Thread model: posix gcc version 3.4.2 |
|
We will put the majority of our emphasis on database benchmarks for this analysis because a quad Opteron server with 8GB of memory is typically an ideal platform for a database. Our rendering benchmarks are also important, but our compilation benchmarks represent the best real-world analysis in our testing.
The core of our benchmarks today run on Red Hat 9 (kernel 2.4.21), which is NUMA aware. Anand wrote a little introduction to NUMA almost two years ago during the Opteron launch, which should illustrate the importance of NUMA in our particular configuration. Some of our benchmarks won't need more than a few hundred megabytes of data and it becomes much more efficient to copy all of this data into the memory of each processor bank. All of our tests run on x86_64 kernels and environments. With the exception of Mental Ray and Shake, all binaries are 64-bit as well.
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dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Typo page 1: "In January, Sun sent us a V40z demonstration unit that was complete with four Opteron 250s and 8GB of PC2700."It should be "four Opteron 850's"
Also, page 3: "The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory"
This is not true, generally. I don't know about the v40z, but CG Opterons can use PC3200 no problem.
See here, for example: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q3/...
Ardan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I agree with #16. Fantastic work, Kristopher! I have a family member that works for a division of Lockheed-Martin and they are dealing with Sun more and more now and he enjoys your articles when I show them to him. He said a few weeks ago that he shows some of these articles to co-workers because of the thorough evaluations and it is helping them to decide whether or not to outfit their systems with Serial ATA drives (for Destroyers) and now with Opteron systems from Sun.Good work! ;)
tfranzese - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Excellent work Kris.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Something is wrong with the DB graphs: i am fixing it now.Kristopher
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
This server is aperantly made by Nhttp://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
OOPS, this is suppost to go where the blank post is.To the author or whom it may concern: A bad link is located on page 3 and reads:
two Samsung 1GB PC2700 – link to Samsung.jpg>
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I want Game Benchmarks too! (just for fun though)nourdmrolNMT1 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
database benchmarks arent workin here either.MIKE