Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server Beats Both the POWER6-Based IBM p570 Server and the Itanium 2-based HP rx8640 Server on Prominent HPC Benchmark

(As of Friday, 13 July 2007)

Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server, based on SPARC64 VI processors running at 2.4GHz (16 chips, 32 cores), delivered a record-setting result the Linpack HPC benchmark.

The Linpack benchmark solves a dense system of linear equation, allowing the user to scale the size of the problem and to optimize the software in order to achieve the best performance of a given machine. This benchmark is a highly parallel test designed to measure how fast a computer system can solve linear equations, a common task in engineering and scientific applications.

Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server, based on SPARC64 VI processors running at 2.4GHz (16 chips, 32 cores), and using Oracle Solaris Studio 12 with Oracle Solaris 10, delivered a score of 268.6 GFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark. This score outperforms the best published IBM p570 score of 239.4 GFLOPS (POWER6@4.7GHz, 8 chips, 16 cores) by over 12 percent and beats the HP rx8640 result of 192.4 GFLOPS (Itanium 2@1.6GHz/24MB, 16 chips, 32 cores) system by 40 percent.

• Benchmark Results