Intel's newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP's DL585 Quad Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on November 10, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
SPECjbb2005
SPECjbb2005 from SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) evaluates the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system with emphasis on the middle tier. Instead of testing with a possible disk intensive database system, SPECjbb uses tables of objects, implemented by Java Collections, rather than a separate database. The SPECjbb score thus depends on:
Performance on the quad Opteron machine is absolutely horrible: the dual Xeon DP 5160 is only a few percent slower than our quad Opteron. As SPECjbb is very memory sensitive we suspected that the NUMA architecture of the Opteron might be influencing the result. The scaling numbers confirmed our assumption: the dual Opteron scored only 48% lower, while we expect a 70% increase from 2 extra cores.
In many cases you would like to run several Java applications on one server with or without virtualization, especially on quad socket machines. Therefore we also tested SPECjbb with four application instances. Using NUMActl, a clever utility written by Andi Kleen, we were able to bind each Java application to one CPU node on the HP DL585.
On the Opteron we used:
If we let Linux manage the four instances, performance increases about 16% compared to using one instance. If we force each instance to stay on one node (one CPU + memory), performance increases spectacularly by 56%! So it seems that it is rather hard for the Linux kernel to keep the instances where they should be. This is good and bad news for AMD: it means that the Opteron 880 can compete with the more expensive Xeon MP, but it also means that the Opteron requires more "manual" optimization than the Xeon MP. The Xeon MP performs at the same level with 4 instances as it does with one.
We suspect that the Sun JVM is reasonably well optimized for the Opteron, and maybe a little bit less effort went into the Intel optimizations as Sun features mostly Opteron and Sparc servers. The BEA JRockit JDK provides a highly optimized JVM for running JAVA applications on the x86-64 and Itanium CPUs. We are still in the process of testing with this JVM, but it seems that the HP DL585 is capable of attaining 110,000 bops, the Supermicro Dual Xeon 5160 about 70 to 75,000 bops and the Tulsa system about 140,000 bops so far. We are trying to find out which tuning parameters are realistic and which ones are maybe a little too extreme. We'll report back soon with our findings, as we have another new server CPU to show you in the near future.
SPECjbb2005 from SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) evaluates the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system with emphasis on the middle tier. Instead of testing with a possible disk intensive database system, SPECjbb uses tables of objects, implemented by Java Collections, rather than a separate database. The SPECjbb score thus depends on:
- The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the way the JVM is tuned
- CPU processing power
- Caching and memory speed
- Multiprocessing configuration (Scalability)
"SPECjbb2005 is a follow-on release to SPECjbb2000, which was inspired by the TPC-C benchmark and loosely follows the TPC-C specification for its schema, input generation, and transaction profile. SPECjbb2005 runs in a single JVM in which threads represent terminals, where each thread independently generates random input before calling transaction specific logic. There is neither network nor disk IO in SPECjbb2005."SPECjbb starts up to two threads per core. For example, with Hyper-Threading enabled on our 8 core quad CPU Xeon MP 7030M system, 32 threads were started on the 16 logical CPUs. Each thread is a warehouse. Again from SPEC.org:
"A warehouse is a unit of stored data. It contains roughly 25MB of data stored in many objects in several Collections (HashMaps, TreeMaps). A thread represents an active user posting transaction requests within a warehouse. There is a one-to-one mapping between warehouses and threads, plus a few threads for SPECjbb2005 main and various JVM functions. As the number of warehouses increases during the full benchmark run, so does the number of threads. A "point" represents the throughput during the measurement interval at a given number of warehouses. A full benchmark run consists of a sequence of measurement points with an increasing number of warehouses (and thus an increasing number of threads)"First we tested with some decent but rather generic tuning that we could use on all systems. The JVM was Sun's, version 1.5.0_08.
java -classpath jbb.jar:check.jar -Xms3072m -Xmx3072m -Xmn1024m -Xss128k -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:+UseParallelOldGC -XX:+UseParallelGC spec.jbb.JBBmain -propfile SPECjbb.props
Performance on the quad Opteron machine is absolutely horrible: the dual Xeon DP 5160 is only a few percent slower than our quad Opteron. As SPECjbb is very memory sensitive we suspected that the NUMA architecture of the Opteron might be influencing the result. The scaling numbers confirmed our assumption: the dual Opteron scored only 48% lower, while we expect a 70% increase from 2 extra cores.
In many cases you would like to run several Java applications on one server with or without virtualization, especially on quad socket machines. Therefore we also tested SPECjbb with four application instances. Using NUMActl, a clever utility written by Andi Kleen, we were able to bind each Java application to one CPU node on the HP DL585.
On the Opteron we used:
numactl -cpubind=(1-4) -membind=(1-4) java -classpath jbb.jar:check.jar -Xms3072m -Xmx3072m -Xmn1024m -Xss128k -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:+UseParallelOldGC -XX:+UseParallelGC spec.jbb.JBBmain -propfile SPECjbb.props -id (1-4)
On the Xeon MP we used:java -classpath jbb.jar:check.jar -Xms3072m -Xmx3072m -Xmn1024m -Xss128k -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:+UseParallelOldGC -XX:+UseParallelGC spec.jbb.JBBmain -propfile SPECjbb.props -id (1 to 4)
If we let Linux manage the four instances, performance increases about 16% compared to using one instance. If we force each instance to stay on one node (one CPU + memory), performance increases spectacularly by 56%! So it seems that it is rather hard for the Linux kernel to keep the instances where they should be. This is good and bad news for AMD: it means that the Opteron 880 can compete with the more expensive Xeon MP, but it also means that the Opteron requires more "manual" optimization than the Xeon MP. The Xeon MP performs at the same level with 4 instances as it does with one.
We suspect that the Sun JVM is reasonably well optimized for the Opteron, and maybe a little bit less effort went into the Intel optimizations as Sun features mostly Opteron and Sparc servers. The BEA JRockit JDK provides a highly optimized JVM for running JAVA applications on the x86-64 and Itanium CPUs. We are still in the process of testing with this JVM, but it seems that the HP DL585 is capable of attaining 110,000 bops, the Supermicro Dual Xeon 5160 about 70 to 75,000 bops and the Tulsa system about 140,000 bops so far. We are trying to find out which tuning parameters are realistic and which ones are maybe a little too extreme. We'll report back soon with our findings, as we have another new server CPU to show you in the near future.
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DigitalFreak - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
No, the DL580 is a quad socket as well.Although it's probably what you already had on hand, the new DL585G2 offers a lot of what you said the DL585 lacked (PCI-E, etc.)
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
My bad, by reading "Woodcrest" (which is wrong) I thought there was some DL580 model that was dual socket that I wasn't aware off. So basically the DL580G4 is Tulsa based, I think the DL585 is a more interesting competitor for our Intel server.The fastest DL580G3 are all Paxville (or even older based) so not interesting for comparison... the spec numbers make it clear it is pretty bad performer.
severian64 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Jason,If you are read this, please include the following benchmarks on Windows for the Quad Intel vs Quad Operton if you do a quad shootout on windows:
1) Windows 2003 Server x86-64 , SQL Server 2005 x86-64
2) Windows 2003 Server x86-32, SQL Server 2005 x86-32, Exchange 2003
For the SQL Server 2005 tests please test all aspects of the database such as SQL Server Integration Services not just SQL statements.
Also, the tests would be most usefull if they were done with 4GB , 8GB and 16GB configs.
Thanks,
Severian.
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