A peek at enterprise hardware (UltraSPARC T2)

[toupeiro]

Its not really everyone who gets the opportunity to pop the hood on some of the cool enterprise hardware out there. SPARC architecture is on rather shaky ground since the Oracle buyout, with all kinds of rumors flying around. The truth about SPARC hardware, as hardware, is that it is some phenomenal stuff. I just recently got my hands on a T5220 server with a Single UltraSPARC T2 running solaris 10. For those unfimilar, the UltraSPARC T2 is capable of handling 64 threads per socket. I thought I would do a prtdiag to show how this CPU registers to the operating system because I think it is rather impressive. prtdiag can display system information, similar to cat /proc/cpuinfo etc etc.. in Linux. And yes, you are reading it right. The OS registers 64 processors.. They don't call the UltraSPARC T2 "coolthreads" for nothing. :) Keep in mind, this is a 2RU, single socket server. The T2 Plus can handle 128 threads per socket simultaneously! If you figure that a standard Intel or AMD chip can handle 2 threads per core, think of how many, or what kind of an Intel or AMD server you would need to handle the same amount of multi-threaded operations that this server can do. Oh, and last but not least, they are certified to support ubuntu!


========================= CPUs ===============================================



CPU CPU

Location CPU Freq Implementation Mask

------------ ----- -------- ------------------- -----

MB/CMP0/P0 0 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P1 1 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P2 2 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P3 3 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P4 4 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P5 5 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P6 6 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P7 7 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P8 8 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P9 9 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P10 10 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P11 11 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P12 12 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P13 13 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P14 14 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P15 15 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P16 16 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P17 17 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P18 18 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P19 19 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P20 20 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P21 21 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P22 22 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P23 23 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P24 24 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P25 25 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P26 26 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P27 27 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P28 28 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P29 29 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P30 30 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P31 31 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P32 32 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P33 33 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P34 34 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P35 35 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P36 36 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P37 37 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P38 38 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P39 39 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P40 40 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P41 41 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P42 42 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P43 43 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P44 44 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P45 45 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P46 46 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P47 47 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P48 48 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P49 49 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P50 50 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P51 51 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P52 52 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P53 53 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P54 54 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P55 55 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P56 56 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P57 57 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P58 58 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P59 59 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P60 60 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P61 61 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P62 62 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

MB/CMP0/P63 63 1165 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2

[stwschool]

I want one.

[handy]

What's the story on GPU's or graphic card slots on these things?

Can you plug in a current nVidia equipped card (or two, or more)? :)

Great games server, if you could get a good 3D graphics card into it as well it looks like you could host various & multiple games whilst playing one as well...

[toupeiro]

There are 6 PCI-E slots total on these servers. 2x 8-lane and 4x 4-lane. There are no SLi capabilities on this machine. This is a rack-mount only piece of hardware. You wouldn't want this sitting on your desk. :)

I know sun used to be in the high end visualisation market, but they aren't really so much anymore. At least, not one of the key players. Sun used to have its own branded XVR series video cards which used ATi or NVidia chipsets, but this was some time ago, and in their workstation models. Their big card in their SPARC workstations was the XVR-2500 which was an ATi FireMV. the ATi Fire line were equivalent to NVidia's Quadro-FX line. They were beasts (and still are.) The Sun Ultra 24 workstation can run a Quadro-FX 5600 card, but the only thing is that the Ultra 24 is a Nehalem workstation, so I doubt that a vanilla Quadro-FX card would work in a SPARC machine, even though its using a PCI-E form factor.


This is really an enterprise server. In fact, the server itself does not even come with on board video. It's optional to order an XVR card, but its designed to run completely headless. This would be a killer game Server, as in to host a game environment that thousands of people played on, but maybe not so much to be a client gaming machine.

[handy]

Thanks for your informative reply. :)

It certainly looks built to do a lot of work.

[osifanatic]

Has anyone been able to install some version of Ubuntu as the Base OS for one of these T5220's? I read only a few months back that this piece of hardware is "Certified" to run Ubuntu, but now the links have gone cold.

I'd -REALLY- like to get some Linux flavor on the box rather than Solaris, so if anyone has been successful in doing so, can you please let me know so I know how to continue?

Cheers,
-Chris

[CharlesA]

Ancient thread. Closed.