The Itanium Solutions Blog

As Senior Director of Application and Performance Engineering at SGI at Silicon Graphics (SGI), I’ve been part of SGI’s efforts to deliver solutions powered by Intel Xeon and Itanium processors to customers around the world. Recently, we announced plans to outfit a new world-class cancer research facility in the UK. The Institute of Cancer Research in London will rely on SGI systems for groundbreaking work in integrative network biology. Unlike mainstream cancer research, which usually focuses on the structure and behavior of individual genes, proteins or cells, this new field studies how how cancer cells interact within the larger biological network. The research could lead to new drugs or treatments that prevent metastasis – the stage when cancer can turn deadly.  Studying the dynamics of cellular networks will generate enormous data sets and involve a wide range of distributed and shared-memory applications, thus requiring a true hybrid solution that addresses both sides of the computational coin.

In my work with the Itanium Solutions Alliance over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege to meet some incredible individuals and companies who have used Itanium-based servers to dramatically transform their business. Each of them had a unique story about achieving significant and quantifiable results using Itanium-based solutions.

To recognize computing excellence using Itanium technology, we sponsor an annual program — the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards. This year’s award categories include: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, and Computationally Intensive Applications. In addition, we will be awarding a $50,000 cash prize for the organization making the most significant Humanitarian Impact using Itanium-based servers. If you have been successfully deploying Itanium-based solutions in one or more of these categories, I encourage you to submit an application.

Winners will receive a variety of high visibility promotional opportunities for their solution and organization, and will be honored at a special event held this September at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Details on the program are available on the Alliance Web site. You can also read about past winners and their award winning solutions.

We are eager to hear from you too! I encourage you to join the prestigious company of others around the globe making an impact in mission-critical computing by applying for the 2009 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards. Good luck!

Yesterday Unisys talked with a CNET blogger about their newest Xeon-based server and in the process, took aim at Itanium-based systems and our community of server vendors. Disputes about performance are one thing – and ignore larger discussions about reliability that any mission-critical application needs to consider – but suggesting a lack of vendor support around Itanium-based servers is a whole other matter. While it is certainly in any server vendor’s interest to use whatever means available to promote a strong price-performance story, especially in light of the challenging economic environment that’s wreaking havoc from banking centers to data centers, to imply that Itanium is lacking industry support or is a “one horse race” doesn’t reflect today’s reality.

The Itanium ecosystem continues to show remarkable strength in the marketplace. Itanium-based systems continue to gain share in both system revenues and system volume against its RISC-based competition. In the third quarter of 2008, Itanium-based system revenue nearly equaled that of Sun SPARC’s worldwide system revenue at 99% — the highest level since Itanium-based systems began shipping. Similarly, Itanium-based system revenue in Q3 2008 achieved the highest level versus IBM Power’s system revenue level for the third quarter of 2008: 71% (Source: IDC Q308 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, December 2008).

At the Alliance we count as sponsors the seven leading global Itanium OEMs, charter members including Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle as well as more than 200 leading application providers. To date there are nearly 14,000 available applications and over 224,000 systems have shipped globally. We continue to see great strength for Itanium in a variety of market segments including mission critical applications, Itanium servers as a foundational platform for IT consolidation and data center modernization, and for computationally intensive environments, and we look forward to a lot of good news from the Itanium community in the coming months. (So stay tuned!)

First of all, I’m new to the Itanium Solutions Alliance blogsphere. Looking forward to blogging and engaging with you.

That said…

Anyone happen to read the recent article from Windows IT Pro magazine, “NEC Enters the North American Server Market?”

Certainly, I appreciate the write-up and acknowledgment from the reputable and well regarded reporter with respect to the tremendous SQL performance of NEC’s Express5800/A1160 Enterprise Server, also affectionately known as our Monster Xeon Server.  However, the little poke in the rib about having Itanium processor-based systems, such as our NEC Express5800/1320Xf server, as being “something of a rarity these days,” caught my attention.

A rarity?? Not according to my sources at IDC.  I checked this out and they say, as of the end of calendar year 2008, Itanium processor total worldwide revenue and shipments are approaching 80% or 90% of equivalent Power and SPARC processors. No disrespect intended for the companies that produce those processors, but I just thought the statement was a little off.

It just could be that NEC Itanium /1320Xf server tends to be a higher end, mission-critical system that is excellent for hosting Windows based operating environments in the datacenter, yet Windows IT Pro magazine covers a lot on higher volume Xeon/midrange platforms.  Anyway, the article is still a nice read if you’d like to know what’s going on with NEC.  Check the article out and let me know what you think…

Greetings! My name is Vyacheslav Shakin, Project Manager at Intel, and this is the first post in what will be a series of blog posts covering the state of Java™ for Intel’s Itanium® Platforms. As you may know, Intel and Sun Microsystems have been collaborating on the development of Sun’s J2SE implementation for Itanium/Linux and Itanium/Windows, culminating in the first release this past October. If you haven’t downloaded those bits (available in both JRE and JDK form), you can access them via the Sun JDK6u11 download pages via these JRE and JDK links. We’ve now had two Hotspot J2SE releases from the Intel/Sun collaboration on Itanium, and the first Hotspot releases for Itanium since back in the Java 1.4.2 days. These new releases are fully Java specification compliant, are well-tested and ready for commercial use, and have been extensively optimized for good application performance on Itanium systems.

Besides re-factoring the base interpreter and profiling infrastructure and adding a new global instruction scheduling component in the JIT compiler, some of the performance enhancements we’ve included in these releases are:
• Itanium specific optimal code generation enhancements
• Tuning of Hotspot’s register allocation to make better use of Itanium’s large register set.
• Compiler modifications to improve Itanium architecture-specific instruction bundling and instruction ordering.

We’re already hard at work on the next release of Java support for Itanium – JDK6u12. The early access version has been posted on Sun’s Java.Net web site, you will need an account to access and download this release. The commercial version of JDK6u12 for Itanium platforms will be released soon, and I’ll be back to post an update once it is available for download. Until then, don’t hesitate to add your comments!