The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon
by Johan De Gelas on November 6, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- CPUs
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- IBM
- POWER
- POWER8
Scale-Out Big Data Benchmark: ElasticSearch
ElasticSearch is an open source, full text search engine that can be run on a cluster relatively easy. It's basically like an open source version of Google Search that can be deployed in an enterprise. It should be one of the poster-children of scale-out software and is one of the representatives of the so called "Big Data" technologies. Thanks to Kirth Lammens, one of the talented researchers at my lab, we have developed a benchmark that searches through all the Wikipedia content (+/- 40GB). Elasticsearch is – like many Big Data technologies – built on Java.
We are not sure why, but installing IBM's JDK caused a lot of headaches. For some reason the JVM stopped working in the middle of our tests. We got the same behavior running Apache Spark. This could be a result of our lack of experience with the IBM JDK, or the fact that the Linux LE ecosytem is still young. To cut a long story short, we ended up useing OpenJDK 8, which is part of the Ubuntu 15.04 distribution. OpenJDK is very similar to and based upon the same code as Oracle's HotSpot JDK.
We limited the systems to one socket to avoid the issues associated with garbage collection pauses and other scaling issues. There is reason why many Java benchmarks on these massive machines are using multiple JVMs.
Although the POWER8 can probably perform a bit better with the IBM JDK, performance is in the same league as the best Xeons. Meanwhile as a further point of comparison we also included the score of the Xeon D from our previous article.
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joegee - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
It was an awesome community. I learned so much from everyone. I remember the days when we'd write pages arguing whether AMD's new 64 bit extension to x86 was truly 64 bit. The discussions could be heated, but they were seldom rude. I wish there were something similar today. :/Kevin G - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Aces brings back memories for me as well even though I mainly lurked there.A solid chunk of that group have moved over to RWT.
joegee - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
What is RWT?psychobriggsy - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Get back to Aces Hardware you!JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Like Ryan said, I have been working 11 years at Anand. In other words, it is great working at Anandtech. AT is one of the few tech sites out there that still values deep analysis and allows the editors to take the time to delve deep.joegee - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
And still writing as well as you ever did! Keep up the good work, Johan!rrossi - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Dear Johan nice article. Did u ever consider sparse system solving (with preconditioning) as a sensitive benchmark? It is a crucial stage of most scientific applications and it is a bandwidth limited operation with a high degree of parallelism. It would be definitely interesting to see how the power 8 fares on such a test. If you are interested I think I could provide a pointer to a simple benchmark (to be compiled). If you feel it may be interesting just drop me an email.JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Interested... mail me, I don't have your mail. See the author link on top of the article.Ian Cutress - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
I'd also like to be pointed to such a benchmark for workstation style tests on x86. Please email ian@anandtech.com with info :)MartinT - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Johan's been with Anandtech for more than a decade, and has been publishing on the subject since the late 90s.But I very much second your "Niiiiice!," as reading his name always reminds me of the old days over at aceshardware, and I'm always looking forward to his insights!