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Is Sun’s T2000 Up To It?

Jonathan Schwartz made the kind of news that makes Slash Dotters happy: he announced Sun is (sort of) giving away free servers. It’s a promotion, a media play, of course, but one that might make a few lucky people very happy.

Here’s the deal: Sun is really proud of their new T2000 eight core server. Each core runs at 1.2GHz, but they’re apparently applying some distributive power of multiplication and calling it an 9.6GHz machine and touting some impressive performance benchmarks. But rather than play the game of “our experts are better than your experts” against other vendors, they’ve extended a pretty generous try and buy program to users themselves. And, as Jonathan made noise in his blog post, a few people might get lucky enough to keep their machines.

So what’s my angle? WPopac rocks, and performance is excellent with my test corpus (160,000 bib records) on even a lowly single-CPU server with only 1GB of RAM, despite the fact that each bib record is represented in both its composed form in the wp_posts table and as about 20 more rows per record in a separate table (yup, I’ve got almost 3 million rows representing every atomic detail of every bib record), and all of this is full-text indexed.

And I’m fully confident that when I put our entire catalog into WPopac, all 330,000 bib records (resulting in about 6.2 million atomic records), performance will still be up to the task. My math suggests everything should be ducky on a relatively budget server up beyond about 1 million bib records, but what happens for libraries that have more than that, say, perhaps 6 to 8 million bib records (again, 110 to 150 million atomic records; again, all full-text indexed in MySQL)?

It would seem that WPopac’s combination of, um, large MySQL databases with high-volume Apache/PHP should be an ideal fit for the T2000’s big RAM space and support for high numbers of parallel threads. Jonathan claims the T2000 costs a modest $5,000 (but the online store shows a higher price?) and outperforms everything else, but is it up to WPopac? Do they want to try?

C’mon Sun, toss a T2000 this way, let’s see what happens? (Heck, I’ll even try a T1000.)

sun, solaris, t2000, coolthreads, server, 9.6ghz, challenge, sparc, ultrasparc, 8core, free, wpopac, performance, big db, Jonathan Schwartz , try-n-buy, try and buy, free server

Posted February 26, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: 8core, 9.6ghz, big db, challenge, coolthreads, free, free server, Jonathan Schwartz, performance, server, solaris, sparc, sun, t2000, try and buy, try-n-buy, ultrasparc, wpopac.

9 Comments

Comment by Reader on February 26, 2006 10:33 pm
Why not just go to the sun website, get a system for free, and write up the stats?
Comment by Casey on February 26, 2006 11:53 pm
Just to be clear, I submitted my try-n-buy application along with everybody else last week. But that shouldn’t stop me from blogging about it while I wait for a response.
Comment by tony:frosty on March 8, 2006 12:15 pm
Oh good you’re trying the program then. Please do let us know how it goes - bad or good. We love to hear the feedback. And if you don’t get the server within two weeks let me know. Have fun!

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/frosty?entry=new_blogs_server

Cheers,
tony : frosty
blogs.sun.com/frosty
Comment by Ian Holsman on March 8, 2006 3:41 pm
Hi.
I’ve created a forum called sunfirefan.com to help people do their benchmarks.. feel free to post your issues there, and hopefully someone can help you out
Comment by Zach on April 27, 2006 8:52 am
So, I got here from here:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/performance/winners.jsp

That’s a winners page, but you didn’t actually get one of these, right?

(courtesy of al)

[tags]alan baker[/tags]
Comment by Magnus on June 6, 2006 9:32 pm
I have tested “try-buy” and I’m dispointed on the performance of T2000, I compared it with a dual cpu v240 which had about 20% better throughput.
I did the follwing tests:
WebSphere Appserver v6 runing cloudscape and PlantsByWebSPhere app and Apache web server and WebSphere Plugin exactly the same setup on v240 as t2000 and the through put was 20% better on the v249 when simulating 100 concurrent users accessing the web app.
Pingback by Solaris + AMP, ASAP « MaisonBisson.com on June 7, 2006 9:02 pm
[...] A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T20000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick. [...]
Comment by RobSeidman on May 26, 2007 4:33 am
On Friday, the first day after Merck’s loss of patent exclusivity for the statin Zocor, FDA approved three generic versions of the drug, the Wall Street Journal reports. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals for the next 180 days will have exclusive rights to sell generic Zocor, generically known as simvastatin. Teva will sell 5-, 10-, 20- and 40-milligram versions, while Ranbaxy will sell an 80-milligram pill. The generic versions are available at a price that is about 30% less than Zocor’s. In addition, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories will sell all five dosages of simvastatin under an agreement with Merck to be the authorized generic manufacturer of the drug. FDA’s decision came hours after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth denied a motion by Sandoz, Novartis’ generic drug unit, to delay the agency’s approval of generic versions. Lamberth said the delay could damage the finances of Teva and Ranbaxy and could restrict the public’s access to affordable drugs (Won Tesoriero/Zhang, Wall Street Jo
urnal, 6/24). FDA estimated that generic versions of Zocor and other generic drugs approved this week — versions of baldness drug Propecia, prostate drug Proscar and epilepsy treatment Lamictal — could result in $1 billion per year in savings. Rob Seidman, chief pharmacy officer for WellPoint, said 12 million Medicare Part D beneficiaries who use statins could generate $8.2 billion in savings per year if they switched to generic versions (CQ HealthBeat, 6/23).
Comment by Edmond on January 9, 2008 10:31 am
Nice news, but some people only started to support T1000 machinces (openbsd for example). BTW what architecture it has? T1000 has sun4v, what about T2000?