Thursday, September 28, 2006

T2000 - initial performance

OK, so I've got the machine running so I thought I would try some simple performance tests.

I know that these aren't going to show the T2000 in a good light. These are simple CPU intensive single-threaded apps. (If you can call them applications.) The aim was to get a feel for just how well the machine would do.

So I have a twin 360MHz Ultra 60, a twin 1.5GHz V240, a quad 1.28GHz V440, an 8x1.0GHz T200, and a 500MHz SunBlade 100 and - for fun - a cheap X2100 with a 2.2GHz Opteron 148.

I copies the /var/sadm/install/contents file from my desktop into /tmp on each machine, and timed grep, wc, gzip, gunzip, bzip2, bunzip2 on the file (it's about 12 Meg). The times, in seconds, are:


U60:
grep 0.540
wc 0.615
gzip 3.055
gunzip 0.619
bzip2 25.589
bunzip2 4.187

SB100:
grep 0.416
wc 0.517
gzip 2.408
gunzip 0.492
bzip2 29.303
bunzip2 4.314

V240:
grep 0.136
wc 0.210
gzip 0.776
gunzip 0.152
bzip2 8.028
bunzip2 1.054

V440:
grep 0.159
wc 0.247
gzip 0.911
gunzip 0.180
bzip2 9.034
bunzip2 1.241

T2000:
grep 0.402
wc 0.656
gzip 2.772
gunzip 0.495
bzip2 17.695
bunzip2 2.285

X2100:
grep 0.079
wc 0.077
gzip 0.445
gunzip 0.092
bzip2 4.053
bunzip2 0.555


What's clear from this is the the Opteron (not entirely unexpectedly) wins by a distance. And the T2000 is handily outpaced by the V240 and V440 - even accounting for clock speed. In fact, the T2000 seems to be - for the completely unfair single tasking case - more comparable to the USIIe/USIIi in something like a V100 or Netra X1.

Of course, once you take into account the parallelism available, the T2000 might be comparable to a whole rack of the old 1U netra systems.

Now to see if some of our applications can be started up on this machine, and if we can test some applications that would suit the T2000 better.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Peter
To get the most out of your tests, please take a look at the Getting Started guide on the Try and Buy support site:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/tnb/start.jsp

From here, you can access the latest patches, but most importantly ensure the system/etc file has the correct paramaeters. Here is a direct link to that page:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/tnb/parameters.jsp

There are also a range of tools available that can greatly accelerate development and performance, including optimised versions of many leading F/OSS components:
http://cooltools.sunsource.net/

Finally, if you do encounter any specific issues, or have questions, you can address them directly to engineers and get a response within 24 hours:
https://www.sun.com/secure/servers/coolthreads/tnb/contact.jsp

Best of luck with your trial

Al Hopper said...

Hi Peter
Thanks for cutting through all the t2000 hype and giving me something of a benchmark that I can relate to. I tried to get qualified on the try&buy program - it just gobbled up a bunch of my time with phone calls and email and then nothing ever happened. I've talked with others who had the same experience. So I was left with no way to get a feel for how slow this machine would be on single-threaded tasks.

I think I'll wait for the Generation 2 version of the T2000. In the meantime, AMD64 rocks!

Anonymous said...

Is /tmp mounted similarly on all those hosts? In other words as tmpfs vs. ufs.

Peter Tribble said...

Oh, yes, it's tmpfs. That's deliberate, to eliminate any filesystem or disk effects.