Laptop Solaris

Sun have announced a series of new servers and workstations, just as I finish up testing of the T1000 and begin testing of the Ultra 20M2.

The key elements are:

• An updated version of the T2000 servers under the Netra brand, designed for the needs of the telecommunications industry
• An improvement to the T1000 to improve reliability (by 23%) and boost disk performance by up to 300%
• New Ultra 25 workstation provides a 300% improvement in performance, designed for Java development

There’s a more detailed press release and a brief summary at Computerworld.

Sun have released an updated list of PCI devices for Solaris x86; check this if you plan to run Solaris on your PC.

PCI Device Support for Solaris OS on x86 Platforms

I’m really only just getting used to the Sun Studio 11 environment after years of using gcc, so quick guides to the Sun Studio 11 command line environment are a great way to get familiar.

There’s just such a list on BigAdmin: Commands for Sun Studio 11 Software.

There are some gems here I wasn’t aware of, like xscapture for capturing user interface design from a running Motif/Xt application; anaylyzer for a GUI performance monitor and dmake, for distributed building.

I think I need to spend some time going through each tool on this list and finding out how best to use it.

My T1000 review at Computerworld has made it to the Sun News page.

Cool!

Sun have very kindly me a sun Ultra 20M2 to test. I’ve only had it a few days, and already I’m hooked.

The spec of the unit they have sent me is:

• 1 AMD Opteron Model 1218 Processor (Dual Core)
• 4GB RAM
• 250GB SATA HD
• NVIDIA Quadra FX 3500 Graphics Card
• 20″ TFT LCD

The LCD monitor is superb, and highly recommended; I’ve been using an identical for years, as the Sun unit is a rebadged 20″ NEC unit (my NEC 2070NX only differs by the inclusion of a USB hub).

In use the machine is fast and very responsive. Raw computing power is available if you want it, but the dual core approach means that using the machine, even when compiling something in the background, remains just as responsive.

For an example of the raw power, I did a very simple test of building the 5.1 version of the MySQL Reference Manual in PDF format. This is a consuming process, as it converts the XML into FO (through XSLT) and then uses Apache’s FOP took to translate the FO into a PDF.

• Apple Mac Book Pro (2.16GHz Intel Core Duo): 13 minutes, 2.921 seconds
• Apple iMac (1.83GHz Intel Core Duo): 13 minutes, 26.779 seconds
• Sun Ultra 20M2 (2.8 GHz Opteron Model 1218 Dual Core): 8 minutes, 32.033 seconds

Full reviews, breakdowns, performance testing and other more detailed thoughts as time goes on.

A Sun engineer provides a detailed (and occasionally light-hearted) look at how to set up an X4200 server through a series of video guides on YouTube.

• Step 1: Anti-Static Setup
• Step 2: Hard Drive Install
• Step 3: PCI Card Install
• Step 4: DVD Install
• Step 5: Network Connection

I noticed for the first time recently the ATA over Ethernet product from Coraid.

There’s a Solaris driver available (impressively in both SPARC binary, Solaris 7+ (direct download) and source (direct download), under a BSD-like license. The release notes are required reading too.

ATA over Ethernet is an interesting concept, albeit an expensive one at the moment, but I like the idea of remote disks, rather than remote computers. The reason is simple: in many ways it would make much more sense for those situations where you want a lot of storage, but still with direct access to the hardware you want to use it on. Traditionally you’d use NFS for that, but that would require a cheap-ish server, which seems a waste. Move the hard disks away (for noise/heat reasons) and keep the CPU and graphics interface local; video production and even large (but not necessarily fast) databases.

Now marry up ATA over Ethernet with ZFS and you could have a phenomenal ZFS pool, accessibly directly from the desktop, and without the need to keep a unit like Thumper in a cabinet next to your desk.

Shame I probably wont get the chance to try it out.

I love the Advanced Lights Out Management (ALOM) module in the T1000.

The T1000 is kept downstairs, and the noise can be uncomfortable, but the ability to power up and down the T1000 remotely over the network makes using it and testing it so much easier.

ALOM should be standard on all computers!

The Niagara II architecture is on the way, and it promises to double the throughput of the original T1 (Niagara) CPU and provide a host of other benefits.

The Niagara CPU (T1) as provided in the T1000 (read my T1000 in more detail review) and T2000 (read T2000 faster than I need) support 8 cores, with 4 threads per core, and a single, shared, FPU. That single FPU becomes a problem in high volume floating point work, because it can slow down the work of all the other cores and threads.

The multiple threads make use of the slower access to RAM to trigger a context switch, so although they are not executing four threads simultaneously, the potential drop in performance of a single thread as it has to access more data enables another thread to run until the data is available. This enables you to get a lot of execution power out of the single core, based on the fact that it would otherwise be sitting there idle.

With the Niagara II CPU there are four significant improvements, based on the same eight-core approach:

• Doubling of thread support to eight simultaneous threads, and therefore 64 simultaneous threads on the one CPU.
• Each core now has it’s own FPU, improving the rate of floating point calculations.
• Upping of the CPU rate to 1.4GHz.
• Support for dual-CPU systems.

That last item is very interesting, because it means that you’ll be able to support a single system with 128 simultaneous threads. If Sun could squeeze that into a 1U unit like the T1000, you could support an impressive 5,376 simultaneous threads within a standard full-height rack.

Of course, to back that up, there are some additional changes. The replacement for the T1000 is expected to support 64GB RAM (twice the current) and the T2000 128GB (also twice the current), and 10Gb Ethernet will be standard on the motherboard.

The rest of the key features will remain the same, including the ability, through software, to control the individual cores and lower power consumption. I’ve mentioned it before, but I still think there could be potential for a portable version of the T1 - the Intel dual core CPUs show that multi-core technology of this type is something that can be applied in a laptop.

The Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation (read Ultra 3 Review) is not a small unit, although the size of the T1 CPU is such that it would take up a significant portion of the case…

Even a 4 core/4 thread version of the Niagara would be an interesting concept, and would keep the size and power requirements down.

Until then, I’ll just have to keep testing the T1000. I’ve spent 3 days now trying out the Cooltools, and I’ll probably be posting the preliminary results this week.

I’m in the process of doing some testing on the T1000 which I currently have on test at the moment. Some of these tests will be entirely focused on the performance of Cheffy, which uses a combination of Apache, MySQL and Perl.

I’ve also been thinking about testing some key elements in terms of where you might use a T1000 - in a web serving farm where you want high performance out your SAMP stack, say for blogging of Wikis, where you have a lot of small, simple, queries that you want executed as quickly as possible. Most variants of this are based around Apache/MySQL/PHP.

Getting everything set up and organized for that isn’t trivial, so it’s great to see a package like the Cool Tools CoolThreads Optimized Open Source Software Stack (Cool Stack)

The package includes Niagara optimized versions of:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Perl
• Squid
• Tomcat

This includes a bundled configuration of Apache with MPM pre-fork and PHP, SSL and Perl modules.

It should go without saying that I’ll be testing this stack against my own configurations and builds as part of the tests.