Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U

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

Other than the two additional processors, differences between these two machines are very small. However, take notice that the V40z is running slower memory than our workstation baseline. As stated in the introduction of this analysis, the "E4" stepping on the Opteron 8xx lineup allows for PC-3200 in a four/eight-way configuration.

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.