All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Playing with fire

speters on 2006-04-13T03:06:43

I’ve been lucky enough to recently get access to the Sun Fire T2000 that Ask and Robert have gotten from the Sun Test Drive program. I have to say that so far it has been quite fun to play with.

The architecture of the new UltraSparc chips is quite interesting. You can check out the OpenSparc website if you are really interested, but it allows each CPU to run four separate, autonomous threads, or strands, as Sun calls them. Because of this, an 8 CPU box, like the perl.org T2000, behaves like a 32 CPU box. I have to say that running gmake –j33 when developing Perl is a real time saver.

More importantly, of course, is that it has helped us to close out a few old bugs as well as help us find a few new ones. Nicholas fixed some parallel build issues that prevented the gmake gymnastics above. He is also playing with parallel testing with harness in the Perl distribution. With multiple CPU cores becoming more common (I’m expecting to see a good number of MacBooks at Alias on 2006-04-13T04:16:41 To your list of "how do virtual computers behave" I would love to see how it handles something like qemu, or something else which would normally really thrash the cache.

I'm already seeing recommendations that the dual core intels aren't usable for two qemu sessions because of that issue, I would expect the "32 processors" to show even more pronounced cache thrashing problems.

More T2000 benchmarks

Aristotle on 2006-04-13T12:42:20

You can find more numbers on Colm MacCárthaigh’s weblog. In particular, don’t miss the Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown.

apples & oranges

jquelin on 2007-03-26T17:27:00

One that I’m interested is comparing the performance of a big 16 CPU Itanium box against the T2000’s 8 CPUs that behave like 32 CPUs.

note that the niagara chip (the one in the t2000) is not powerful in number crunching and other high-cpu loads such as... compilations. it's good for multi-threading and parallel tasks, such as java application servers and this kind of stuff. so i can foresee that your 16-ways itanium box will outperform the t2000 with a high margin. but for web servers and other highly parallel tasks, the niagara chip rocks! (pun intended ;-) )

Re:apples & oranges

link on 2007-03-26T20:47:17

We use the t2000 mentioned in the blog above as a terminal server. I guess running shells for 100+ users is about as parallel as you get.