New SPARC servers tip up from Sun and Fujitsu

SUN MICROSYSTEMS and Fujitsu have debuted new hardware offering based on Sun’s UltraSPARC T2 chip. The companies are now selling the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and the T5240, two new servers which run on the updated UltraSPARC, AKA Niagara 2, under the Sun and Fujitsu brand names.

The new T5140 and T5240 both support two processors, giving Sun what it claims to be an edge in the multiprocessor (MP) market. The new chips which the company produced especially for MP servers have an additional bit of circuitry bunged into them to produce what Sun calls "cache coherency", which it says lets the chips talk to each other for better load balancing.

The firms say that the presence of two UltraSPARC chips means that they are now able to process 128 instructional threads at the same time on the 16 processing cores within each machine, leading to improved energy and space efficiency of data centres. The 128 threads are achieved using virtualisation technology that Sun has dubbed Solaris Containers and Logical Domains.

John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems, told EWeek the company plans on adding to its Niagara-based line later this year with a two-socket blade server followed by a four-socket system offering as many as 256 compute threads.

Sun also reckons that its latest UltraSPARC-based systems offer customers an alternative to commodity x86 servers using Intel or AMD processors. Sun seemingly put more of a focus on performance rather than on simply increasing clock speeds (the UltraSPARC T2 runs at a leisurely 1.4GHz) by adding more cores and threads in order to lower latency and improve bandwidth.

Sun says that works out at about two-and-a-half to five times higher performance than a two-socket, Intel-based system and a five-fold improvement in price performance.

The company adds that the Niagara chips’ improved floating point capabilities and increased memory bandwidth will also help to push the company forward in the field of high-performance computing. µ

L’Inq
EWeek