Sun T1000 60 day trial machine arrived
A few days ago the Sun T1000 machine arrived that we ordered for a 60 day trial’n buy run. Historically we already worked with and supplied Sun UltraSPARC machines and even are one of the few that support this platform in our own Linux distribution (T2 SDE).
Of course, this massively parallel machines are just impressive. With its 6 or 8 cores, each with 4 threads of execution you get 24 or 32 processes or threads running in parallel on your machine. Though only when they do integer computations, since all those threads share the same and only FPU (Floating Point Unit). Though usually this is not too much of an issue in classic thruput computing such as Web, File or Database serving or custom scientific applications where you have the choise how to implement computations. The only thing that needs to make sure is to have enough processes or threads running to saturate the machine. Just one big binary without any thread will only give you 1/24 to 1/32 of the machines power, but saturated the machine performs like 24 to 32 GHz machine that you would need from competors to do the job!
And now the suprise for people that do not yet have read the T1 CPU (codenamed Niagara) SPECs: The CPU just consumes less than 80W and the whole machine is said to require less than 100W.
So it is nice to see that Sun is again ahead of companies like AMD or Intel that just ship 2 core CPUs today, plan for just 4 cores the next year and we have bare computational power to choose from.
