Sun’s T2000 “Coolthreads” Server: First Impressions and Experiences

Words of thanks

A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we like to thank them, of course.

Chhandomay.Mandal, Sun US
Luojia Chen, Sun US
Peter A.Wilson, Sun US
Peter Hendrickx, Sun Belgium
(www.sun.com)

Colin Boroski, LPP (www.lpp.com)

Damon Muzny, AMD US (www.amd.com)

Ilona van Poppel, MSI Netherlands
Ruudt Swanen, MSI Netherlands
(www.msi-computer.nl)

Waseem Ahmad, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
Trevor E. Lawless, Intel US
(www.intel.com)

Bert Devriese, developer of MySQL&PHP benchmark
Brecht Kets , Development of improved Bench program
Tijl Deneut, Solaris support
Dieter Saeys, Linux support
Ben Motmans, .Net development
Sam Van Broeck, DB2 support

I also like to thank Lode De Geyter, manager of the PIH, for letting us, once again, use the infrastructure of the Technical University of Kortrijk to test the servers.


Benchmark configuration

We used Solaris 10 for the Sun T2000, as the only supported OS for the T2000 right now is Solaris 10 3/05 HW2 (and upwards). The T1 is fully binary compatible with the existing SPARC binaries, but it needs this version of Solaris.

The Sun T2000 server was the only that used 16 x 2 GB DIMMs, resulting in 32 GB of RAM. This gives the T2000 a small disadvantage in our first round of benchmarking (we do not use more than 4 GB in our web server test). So, the Sun CPU has a bit more "managing pages" overhead. However, Sun advised us to populate all DIMMs; so we did.

All benchmarking was monitored by our laptop as you can see on top. CPU load, network and disk I/O was observed, thanks to CPU graph, top, vmstat and prstat. This way, we could see whether or not the CPU or another component was the bottleneck.

Our web server tests were performed on Apache2 2.0.55, including the mod_deflate module for gzip compression, PHP 4.4.0-r9 and Mysql 4.0.24. This last MySQL version was chosen because it came standard with our Sun T2000 and all tests proved to be very reliable with this version


Hardware configurations

Here is the list of the different configurations:

Sun T2000: Sun UltraSparc T1 1 GHz, 8 cores, 32 threads
Sun Solaris 10
32 GB (16x2048 MB) Crucial DDR-2 533
NIC: 1 Gb Intel RC82540EM - Intel E1000 driver

Intel Server 1: Dual Intel Xeon "Irwindale" 3.6 GHz 2 MB L2-cache, 800 MHz FSB - Lindenhurst
Gentoo Kernel 2.6.15-gentoo-r1
Intel® Server Board SE7520AF2
8 GB (8x1024 MB) Micron Registered DDR-II PC2-3200R, 400 MHz CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel® PRO/1000 Server NIC (Intel® 82546GB controller)

Opteron Server 1: Dual DualCore Opteron 275 and 27HE (2.2 GHz - 4 cores total)
Gentoo Kernel 2.6.15-gentoo-r1
Solaris x86 10
MSI K8N Master2-FAR
4 GB: 4x1GB MB Crucial DDR400 - (3-3-3-6)
NIC: Broadcom BCM5721 (PCI-E)

Opteron Server 2: MSI K2-102A2M, Dual Dual Core Opteron 275 and 275 HE
Gentoo Kernel 2.6.15-gentoo-r1
Solaris x86 10
4 GB: 4x1GB MB Crucial DDR400 - (3-3-3-6)
NIC: Broadcom BCM5721 (PCI-E)

Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512 MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705

Shared Components
1 Seagate Cheetah 36 GB - 15000 RPM - SCSI 320 MB/s Maxtor 120 GB DiamondMax Plus 9 (7200 RPM, ATA-100/133, 8 MB cache)

Common Software
Apache2 2.0.55 + mod_deflate module for gzip compression
PHP 4.4.0-r9
Mysql 4.0.24