One Dual-Node Blade — Two World Records

BENCHMARK SUMMARY

(As of Tuesday, 14 April 2009)

Designed for ultimate throughput and density, Oracle’s dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server module combines the compute capacity of four Intel Xeon 5500 series processors with OpenSolaris to deliver better performance than any other blade, setting world records for both integer and floating point throughput.

Each Sun Blade X6275 server module has two full-function compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon processors, up to 96GB of high-speed memory, integrated IB QDR Host Channel Adapter (HCA), Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), and Oracle’s optional Sun Flash Module and Sun PCIe ExpressModule I/O. The configurability of the system ensures that the same blade module can run compute-intensive, memory-intensive, communication-intensive or I/O-intensive applications, so customers can address more diverse HPC workloads.

BENCHMARK DESCRIPTION

The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compilers on a variety of real-world compute intensive workloads and consists of two benchmark suites. One suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance while the other measures and compares floating-point performance. For each of these suites, two metrics are collected. One measures how fast the computer completes a single task and the other measures how many tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time (throughput).

BENCHMARK OUTCOME

Innovative and integrated design of this system, in combination with OpenSolaris and Oracle Solaris Studio 12 Update 1 software, allowed the Sun Blade X6275 server module (16 cores/4 chips/32 threads) to produce the record-breaking SPECint_rate2006 score of 478 and the SPECfp_rate2006 result of 355.
The compound effect of using the most advanced Intel Xeon X5500 series processors in conjunction with OpenSolaris and Oracle Solaris Studio 12 Update 1 propelled the Sun Blade X6275 server module to the top blade position on SPEC's compute-intensive throughput benchmark.
Oracle utilized OpenSolaris. Additionally, Oracle Solaris Studio compiler software that includes the latest features and capabilities was instrumental in landing this groundbreaking result.
The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark provides a broad variety of workloads such as protein sequencing, MPEG-4 decoding, XML processing, structural mechanics and speech recognition.
OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Oracle Solaris Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software used to produce this result are available for download.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Competitive data obtained from www.spec.org as of the date located next to the respective claim. See the Website for latest results. For comparison purposes, the terms CPU, chip, and processor are used interchangeably. Each socket can accommodate one chip.