Sun launches two socket CMT servers

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Marc Hamilton is blogging today about the release of Sun’s newest servers

Sun logoToday, Sun launched the T5140 and T5240 servers, the world’s first two socket CMT servers. Powered by two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, these servers can execute an amazing 128 threads at the same time

…We have been quietly shipping these servers for several weeks already, and plenty of customers have had a chance to find things to do with their 128 threads. HPCVL, one of Canada’s regional HPC centers is already using several dozen of these servers to run their highly threaded HPC applications.

I did manage to pull what I thought was a useful quote from Sun’s Customer Testimonial page about the T2 Plus (Ok, so I know this isn’t exactly an unbiased source….) According to Georg Hager in the RRZE department of the University of Erlangen

“Through our extensive testing with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server, we found that despite the theoretical memory bandwidth of single-socket UltraSPARC T2 and dual-socket T2 Plus processor systems to be the same, the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor architecture delivers 30% more memory bandwidth, which results in exceptionally high throughput and scalability on Computational Fluid Dynamic applications, without having to reoptimize any code. It just scaled across processor sockets.

We found the 2 x UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors in the 1 Rack Unit high Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Server to be equivalent in performance with up to 6 dual-core AMD Opteron processors for CFD code.

You can read Sun’s announcement here.