The Itanium Solutions Blog

A regular contributor to the Itanium Solutions blog, Christian Tanasescu, has been promoted to vice president of software engineering at SGI. In his new role, Christian will be responsible for system software and middleware development, independent software vendors (ISVs) relationships, applications benchmarking and SGI’s cloud computing solution, Cyclone™.

Since joining SGI in 1992, Mr. Tanasescu has held a number of technical management roles including: HPC system engineering, strategic partner management, performance modeling and application enablement programs.

View a collection of Christian’s posts to the Itanium Solutions blog.

Read the original press release from SGI.

Congratulations Christian!

Masaryk University located in Brno, Czech Republic, is one of the largest universities in central Europe with more than 40,000 students and 800 fields of study. During the last few years we’ve focused on creating a unique and integrated environment for our core “business process” — learning! Do you want to apply for admission, enroll in a course, pay for it, download study materials, or keep in contact with friends after graduation? All the application forms and data can be reached easily via the web at the Masaryk University Information System!

Although many applications in the system are typical for other enterprise OLTP solutions; such as creating orders, making payments or distributing multimedia contents, Masaryk University Information System also contains other tools developed in-house, like the algorithm we use to detect plagiarism. All of the applications run concurrently on an Itanium-based database server from SGI with Oracle Database and about 30 CPU sockets.

It was a real surprise for us being selected as an Itanium Innovation Award finalist this year because we usually compare our solution only with similar university systems. In addition, we welcome this opportunity to share our experience working with large-scaled database servers with other users and vendors at the Innovation Awards Celebration. See you there!

Miroslav Kripac, System Architect, Masaryk University

This week SGI published three new word records at Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) for SPECjbb2005, SPECfp_rate_base2006 and SPECint_rate_base2006. The SGI benchmarking team achieved these results at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, on an Altix 4700 with 1024 Itanium 9040 cores, 1.6GHz, 18MB cache and running SLES10 with ProPack. The results reconfirm that SGI Altix 4700 is the most scalable platform suitable for application fusion as proved by the new world record results in the series of SPEC benchmarks:

SPECjbb2005 benchmarks evaluate the performance of servers running typical Java business applications for Internet, finance, enterprise and database applications by emulating a three-tier client/server system, with emphasis on the middle tier. The benchmark exercises the capabilities of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), its operating system and the performance of CPUs, caches, memory hierarchy and the scalability of the shared-memory system. SGI raised the bar again to recapture undisputed leadership in this benchmark with 9,611,262 Business Operations per Second (BOPS) on Altix 4700 with 512 Itanium 9040 cores,1.6GHz and 18MB cache using Oracle® JRockit, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The new SGI record is over 74 percent higher than the previous record.

SPEC CPU2006 rate benchmark measures the capacity of a system to complete a fixed number of tasks. In a large shared-memory environment, this test stresses the scalability of the operating system, the memory subsystem, and to some extent the I/O subsystem.

SPECfp_rate_base2006 is an indicator of system response for HPC workloads; it is a mix of floating point intensive applications from different domains that stress the platform in different ways. Running SPECfp_rate_base2006 at this scale is non-trivial because it puts significant stress on the kernel, scheduler, file system, memory bandwidth and IO bandwidth. Using a partition of the Altix 4700 system at LRZ, configured with 1024 Itanium cores, 1.6GHz and 18MB cache, SGI achieved the word record with a SPECfp_rate_base2006 score of 10600. This result is more than five times faster than the closest Single System Image (SSI) competitor on the SPEC list.

SPECint_rate_base2006 is an industry-standard benchmark suite to measure system performance when running an integer-intensive workload. The same challenges mentioned above apply to run at this scale. On the SGI benchmarking team set the SPECint_rate_base2006 world record, achieving a score of 9030, which is four times faster than the next closest SSI competitor.

To complete this story, let me recall another important result. Since 2006, SGI Altix 4700, installed at LRZ, has held the world record for STREAM, the industry-standard benchmark to measure the aggregate memory bandwidth,with 4.35TB/s, which is 5x faster than the closest SSI competitor.

To summarize the facts, SGI Altix 4700 is proven to be:

This leads me to the conclusion that Altix 4700 with Intel Itanium processors defines a new platform class: extreme scale-up architecture, it pushes the scale-up concept to new limits.

Why is scale-up relevant? Well, many key HPC problems like cryptography, fraud detection, search engines, complex event processing and graph-based problems, simply do not run on clusters. As an IDC study revealed, the majority of ISV applications run on a single node because massive in-memory computation enables full-scale system simulation without the need to reduce resolution or precision, and without breaking the problem apart. Applications bound by random I/O data access can achieve huge performance gains when bringing the entire dataset into memory. Load balancing can not be corrected on a small node cluster without explicitly copying data to it. In a scale-up system, the work is simply directed to the available processor. Most importantly for developers, the single system image doesn’t restrict parallel programming models that can be used, including hybrid schemes, to enable key research into programming model use, which is especially important as we move into the new world of multi-core CPUs. And of course, system administration is much easier.

SPEC results are available at:

http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/res2009q3/jbb2005-20090727-00756.html
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q3/cpu2006-20090802-08313.html
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q3/cpu2006-20090802-08312.html
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/top20/Bandwidth.html

SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 9/03/2009.

A blog post today from the CEO of SGI, Mark Barrenechea, made some significant and assertive statements regarding their line of Itanium servers, roadmap, and aspects of a common architecture.

Read his FLOPS:

“SGI Altix Itanium systems power some of the most important systems in the world - from conducting global warming research to fraud detection to homeland security. Itanium offers unique value in RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and memory addressability unmatched by any other non-strictly-proprietary microprocessor. We expect to continue to sell SGI Altix Itanium for many years to come.”

“[Ultraviolet] represents the next generation of Altix, designed to utilize both Itanium and Xeon processors.”

“As Intel continues to deliver its QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technologies, we believe we can continue to develop a common architecture to address both Xeon and Itanium processors.”

Read the full post

As a leader in computationally intensive computing, SGI tends to set the pace for the large memory systems often required to crunch the numbers in massive data sets. In a recent press release, we announced that our Altix systems have now achieved 21 Terabytes of globally addressable memory at customer sites. I’d like to explain what this means in more depth and offer examples.

The Altix 450/4700 (Itanium) systems can accommodate 128 terabytes of globally shared memory under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system. The system may also be partitioned among multiple instances of Linux and provide globally addressable shared memory among OS instances via SGI’s unique NUMAlink® interconnect technology. What this means to the customer is essentially saving time: time-to-results, time-to-solution and time-to-innovation. It significantly simplifies application development and debugging for all parallel programming models be it OpenMP, pthreads, MPI or SHMEM.

In addition, it offers an integrated platform for application fusion, which enables running a mix of different applications and workloads. As workloads usually change during the project life-cycle, a global shared memory platform lowers TCO compared to clusters that require node reconfiguration.

We have seen great success for memory-resident database applications with uses in Internet data centers and transaction processing; as well as those based on “graph theory,” an important area of mathematics with uses in defense and homeland security applications, multi-disciplinary science, and data assimilation. Some customers who are already seeing the advantages of the SGI Altix product line are:

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: the laboratory here uses an SGI Altix 4700 system with 4,608 Intel Itanium processors in a single supercomputer equipped with 20 TB of globally addressable memory and 440 TB of usable disk space. Globally addressable memory means applications can be shared across various operating systems via SGI NUMAlink. One of the largest computers in the Department of Defense, the SGI resource helps DoD researchers to design faster, reduce risk by increasing the quality of modeling and simulation, and support an intensifying effort to develop “game-changing” computational science and engineering applications.

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Munich (LRZ): This facility operates a 4,864 Intel Itanium processor system with slightly over 39 TB of globally addressable memory that is hard at work solving increasingly complex simulations in physics and astrophysics, materials research, fluid dynamics, chemistry, geosciences and biological sciences.

Click here for more information about SGI® Altix® Itanium globally addressable memory capabilities, or click here for the press release.