Sun Sparc performance

[Ron Chen]

Sun boxes are slow. There are several problems with
them:

1. OS - Solaris is slow. Linux is fast, esp the file
system, but async update is much more dangerous to the
data.

2. CPU - USparc has a lower SPEC score than PIII which
has a lower SPEC score than K7.

3. Expensive - no need to say too much here :-)

Nevertheless, there are some good features of those
boxes:

1. I/O is more balanced - you can't expect Intel
Architecure to beat them in terms of I/O speed.

2. Solaris scales better - it is slower for the
low-end case but it scales better when there are more
(64) CPUs in one box.

3. More add-on products - Sun has opensourced serveral
products which helps the techical computing world. One
of them is Sun HPC for parallel computing, the other
one is SGE for batch-queuing distributed jobs. There
are several more products, like the high-performance
libaraies, parallel debugger, etc.

HPC: http://www.sun.com/software/hpc/
SGE: http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

-Ron

P.S. SGE is also available for Linux and other OSes. 



--- Laurence Liew <laurence at elinux.com.sg> wrote:
> Dear Chean Leng,
> 
> It really depends on your application, whether it
> makes use of the features of
> the SPARC CPU... 
> 
> I have had clusters of Alpha, AMD and INTEL and
> running different applications
> ranks them differently...
> 
> I would think that a SUN box brings to your cluster
> a higher reliability
> (hardware) then pc-based systems... this may be
> important for jobs that run for
> long periods.. more than a week????
> 
> However.. with SUN... it is not a Beowulf cluster
> anymore :-) SUN boxes are
> generally not considered COTS... 
> 
> Cheers!
> Laurence
> 
> Quoting clpoh <clpoh at pl.jaring.my>:
> 
> > Has anybody tried Beouwlf clustering on Sun Ultra
> SPARC machines ? I
> > did
> > a benchmark on 3 sets of Sun Ultra SPARC machines
> using POVRAY but the
> > result I got is even slower than my other cluster
> with AMD K6-2. iS
> > THIS
> > OK ?
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Poh Chean Leng
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
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> > 
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> Laurence
> eLinux Pte Ltd
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or
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http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf



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