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143 Posts tagged with the performance tag
Wesley Shimanek
0

 

Ok, so you have bought into the potential benefits of simultaneous workflows from my previous blogs where organizations may choose work differently and develop parallel workflows in order to potentially:

 

  • compress the time between an idea and a product or,

  • innovate faster and deliver finished animations in less time

  • or simply work on larger more complex assemblies or analyses

 

 

 

Ok so now it's time to say I doubt the performance is really available to get this done.

 

 

 

 

The honest answer is it depends on how much you want to stress the system, because there are limits. But Russ Sagert, Petrel Portfolio Manager from Schlumberger Information Systems suggests "workstations based on the new Intel® Xeon® 5400 series processors change the game for our customers. These new workstations featuring faster processors, larger memories, two new advanced PCI Gen2 graphics adapters give users a remarkably interactive experience and an opportunity to employ parallel geophysical workflows that combine complex large scale attribute analysis and volume visualization. Net result: Higher quality results and, better more informed decisions in less time than ever before."

 

 

 

 

Alright that is mouthful, but today's Intel® Xeon® based workstations do present the performance necessary to potentially change your game and help you innovate faster - are you game?

 

 

 

 

So what is the secret behind the performance?

 

 

 

 

The "Core" is. Not 4 cores, not 2 cores, or 8 even cores -- just Intel's new Core microarchitecture. Introduced in 2006, and extended with the availability of the Intel® Xeon® 5400 series, Intel's new Intel's new Core microarchitecture is the foundation that enables demanding users with the processing capacity and visualization capability to change the way they work and use simultaneous workflows to continuously iterate through design ideas, rapidly test via simulation, and find design errors earlier. The Intel Core Microarchitecture helps deliver the power to innovate.

 

 

 

 

Here is a quick look at some of the Intel innovations that are changing the performance game - we will discuss them more in future blogs:

 

 

 

  • Intel® Wide Dynamic Execution - Increases performance and energy efficiency by enabling the delivery of more instructions per clock cycle and enhancing the efficiency of instruction execution.

  • Intel® Advanced Digital Media Boost - Effectively doubles the instructions' execution speed compared to previous Intel based solutions and accelerates a broad range of applications, including financial, engineering, scientific video, speech and image, photo processing, and encryption software.

  • Intel® Advanced Smart Cache, which is optimized for multi-core processing and reduces latency to frequently used data

  • Intel® Smart Memory Access optimizes the use of the available data bandwidth from the memory subsystem and

  • Intel® Intelligent Power Capability improves energy efficient performance and reduces noise and energy consumption.

  • Macro Fusion combines instructions into a single instruction for execution, delivering more efficient processing and faster throughput.

 

 

 

Net result is Intel's new Core Microarchitecture can help you hit a high note in performance and an even higher note in innovation when you move to simultaneous workflows.

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: performance, core, microarchitecture
Alan Priestley
0

 

I often get asked what type of server a customer should use when landing their virtualised infrastructure, the immediate response is an obvious one, given I work for Intel - an Intel based server ! But beyond this the answer is a little more complex and to some extent depends on the philosophical approach the data centre manager wants to take to architecting their data centre.

 

There are a number of choices that can be made when using standard Intel based server hardware - ignoring the obvious decision as to the hypervisor vendor - DP ( 2-way ) vs MP ( 4-way ) servers, rack mount vs blade.

 

Ultimately any server decision is the right one ( so long as its an Intel based solution ) but some of the factors that will influence the decision are :-

 

 

 

  • How many virtual machines ( VMs ) are you prepared to host onto a single server - MP servers can host substantially more VMs than DP - over 2x more depending on the workload within the VMs - this is down to the better memory capacity and larger number of I/O slots that MP servers typically support compared to DP servers. Against this using a DP server may be a better solution as 2 DP servers may cost less than an MP server, and combined host as many VM's whilst not having as many VMs hosted onto a single server.

 

  • Density & Form factor - DP servers typically have a higher density form factor than MP servers - at the expense of less I/O & memory capability. But you need to take into consideration that an MP server can host more VMs than a DP server so within a given rack space use of a lower number of MP servers may well enable hosting of more VMs than using more DP servers.

 

  • Blades vs Rack - there is significant momentum building behind the move to bladed servers, mostly driven by the fact that the density achievable using blades is far higher than that possible use rack mount servers. Also the shared resources of a blade solution ( power supplies, cooling, network switches etc ) can lead to cost and power savings in high density configurations. The challenge with hosting a virtualised infrastructure on blade servers however is that blades tend to be limited in the amount of memory and I/O that they can support. The trade off of course is that with the increased density of a blade solution its possible with fewer VMs/Blade but more Blades/rack the overall number of VMs that can be hosted within a given data centre is greater using blades than rack mount servers.

 

Other factors to take into consideration are that MP servers typically have a higher level of built-in RAS ( reliability, availability & serviceability ) features than DP servers and when hosting multiple VMs on a single server the overall reliability of a servers and its ability to be serviced without shutting down all the hosted VMs becomes very important to the overall efficiency of the Data Centre.

 

As I said at the beginning - there is no simple answer and a lots depends on the approach you want to take in architecting your solution. Intel's own IT department has done lots of work in this area and have posted many of their results here for others to learn from their experiences.

 

The only thing that is for certain is that whatever decision is made on form factor the performance of the processors you specify has a direct impact on the number of VMs a server can host - the higher the CPU performance the more VMs that can be hosted and the lower the impact of the hypervisor overhead on the overall system performance, check out the latest virtualisation performance data here and here

0 Comments Permalink Tags: datacenter, virtualization, xeon, performance, server, blade, rack
Todd Christ
2

Take a look at the chart below ... it's telling you something... isn't it?

It's more than performance numbers and marketing, it's data... REAL data!

But what does it mean - and ultimately - how can you relate to it?

 

 

If you're really into high-powered computing, you're probably quite familiar with common benchmark data. With every new CPU release, there are tons of new statistics, models, and ways to test the increased performance of the newer technology device - in this case, the 45nm based CPUs just recently launched this month. But what exactly does all this data amount to? Reading benchmarks is more than just seeing a bar chart - there's a science to digging into the data...

 

First, lets take a step back for some of you who may not fully understand what benchmarking is for. Benchmarks help to provide a common ground for comparing the performance of various systems across different CPU/system architectures. A common set of instructions (or programs) are setup to run within a regulated guideline to ensure the testing is performed equally across the competing platforms or architectures. Very much like in sports, if you have two different runners - they run the same path - i.e. the 100 yard dash. This creates the comparative benchmark.

 

So let's get back to the latest hot stuff - the Intel Xeon 5400 Series and Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad Core based processors. In the past 18 months, computing models have taken a giant leap forward by adding more CPU's per socket thereby increasing the thread density of your platform. In dual socket systems, you used to have two threads you now have four or even eight! And in quad socket systems the count can go up to 16! You're increasing your capacity to perform computational data by a factor of 3 or 4 depending on the platform. This has made a tremendous change in how benchmarks have had to be setup to run and we have to evaluate the testing methods to ensure we're maximizing the computability of each platform.

 

There are a few key steps to take before you consider benchmarking your system:

  1. identify your problem area (processing power, network bandwidth, memory utilization, etc)

  2. identify your competing products

  3. evaluate the 'leaders' in your problem area

  4. survey for available benchmarking tools

  5. evaluate 'best practices' for testing (e.g. lower idle power based processors won't really help much if you're only doing high-end computing)

  6. and then - implement your findings in your chosen architecture(s)

 

In the high-end server space you usually see more vendor specific data rather than end-user testing. Primarily because of the finite set of data that server administrators are looking for. Many of these 'industry standards' are monitored for efficiency and ensure the end-user that the testing was properly performed and the results are repeatable:

 

Industry Standard Benchmarks

 

Intel uses many of these standards for benchmarking - as you can see here in the Xeon 5000 Series based Processors Benchmark Page

 

Even if you're a server admin, you most likely interact with clients for day to day performance as well. If you search the web for CPU benchmarks the most commonly viewed benchmarks are performed on the client side of computing, mainly because of a few factors:

 

  1. clients are usually cheaper and more abundant to test with

  2. visuals in client computing are usually more fun to watch than seeing SQL data fly across the screen (hey - just being honest here!)

  3. and servers in general are built for more specific reasons, whether it's application, storage, modeling or other specialties

 

Many of you have probably heard of benchmark sites such as: Anandtech, Toms Hardware, FiringSquad, HardOCP and many others (respond with your favorites please!) Each of these sites use common tools/applications to benchmark the latest and greatest hardware against each other. Depending on what you're looking to do with your hardware really determines what/how you want to benchmark your system (or look for data reviews for your configuration). After all, a machine that can run the latest games at over 60 frames per second may not be the best SQL server for your datacenter - right?

 

If you're looking for quick 'brute force' computational tools to try your hand at CPU benchmarking, try something simple like BOINC, Super PI, or you can get more elaborate by using some methods as described by C-Net by using Cinebench, or SiSoftware Sandra. Once you've figured out some of the basics - and can repeat these simpler tests - you can jump into those Industry Standards and get into some serious work!

 

So in closing, there are so many variables to account for when looking to validate the performance of a given system. Processor speeds, I/O subsystem configuration, memory latencies, network bandwidth, power utilization, etc... the permutations are nearly endless. So you have to be diligent in initially addressing your key problem(s), and attack the solution in benchmarking using the best known methods. Also, when reading benchmark information BE SURE to read the configurations of the systems in question - are they truly comparable? are the components running at spec level or overclocked? Are the speed differences negligible, or substantial in real-world evaluation? And finally, focus on what's important to you and your computing requirements - after all, you need to be sure you've picked the correct system for your needs.

2 Comments Permalink Tags: performance_benchmark, todd_christ, 45nm, performance, benchmark
Alan Priestley
0

As this is the first time posting here, here is a quick intro, I started out as a hardware designer for a UK computer company - back in the days when the PC was still a grey tin box with a 4.77MHz 8088 inside. I have been with Intel now for more years than I care to think about, with much of this time working with the OEMs and end-customers focused in the server market across EMEA.

 

As I trawl thru the press and listen to the industry analysts one topic that everyone is discussing is 'data centre efficiency' ( even elsewhere on this forum Intel IT Data Center Efficiency Initiative - Going Green, Data Center Efficiency ) but what's not real clear is what defines an efficient data centre - is it the efficiency of the servers, the cooling subsystems, the workload that can be handled in a given time or the operational processes that are in place to run the data centre ? And once you have decided what is considered 'efficient' how do you measure or quantify this efficiency.

 

Currently there are several approaches being considered by the industry to measure data centre efficiency, and I thought it would be worth spending some time looking at three elements that can affect DC efficiency - power, utilisation and process. Given the complexity of the topic I plan to take this in bite sized chunks ( rather than write a mass of text and lose the thread ). So, in this blog I will cover power and will come back to the topic in a subsequent posting to look to the other elements. If you think there are elements to DC efficiency that I am missing please feel free to chip in and provide your insights.

 

Power Efficiency - Measuring the ratio between the facilities load - cooling, power conversion etc vs. the IT load - compute/storage/infrastructure. Typically this approach focus's on the ratio of electrical power consumption of the various elements within the data centre. With the current focus on the 'environmental & green' aspects of data centres this seems to be the area where most of the attention on Data centre efficiency is focused.

 

If you look at the average Data Centre today its not just the compute infrastructure that consumes the Watts, power gets consumed by the cooling systems and air conditioners, voltage conversion & battery storage, lighting etc. All this contributes to the 'facilities load' - for many IT managers this does not hit their IT budget and they may not even see the power bill from the utility company so have no idea how much power is consumed by these key elements of their data centre. Current estimates indicate that upwards of 50% of the power that comes into the average data centre gets 'lost ' in the facilities load, more details here & here

 

There are several groups looking to quantify energy efficiency The Green Grid is working on metric called PUE ( Power Usage Effectiveness ) to measure the ratio of power consumed by the facilities load vs. the power available to the IT equipment in the data center - details in their white papers here. Also the Uptime Institute are doing something similar and various government institutions are getting interested as well and there's an extensive US govt white paper ( if you have a few hours spare to ingest its 150 pages) . In addition the European Union is working on a Data Centre Code of Conduct

 

The server OEMs are also working on a benchmark for measuring perf/watt ( http://www.spec.org/specpower/ ), these are great for measuring how good a server is on a test workload and how many transactions it can deliver for a given power input. With the increased focus on energy efficient performance this metric will become more and more important to the specifiers and purchasers of servers. With Intel's latest generation 45nm quad core Xeon processors we continue to drive up the performance a processor can achieve for a given Watt input, the challenge for the rest of the industry now is to lower the overall power consumption of the other elements within the server and to increase the throughput of the storage and I/O subsystems to complement the increase processor performance. But at the end of the day does a good perf/watt for a server indicate that a data centre is efficient ?

 

What's missing from this approach is that there is often no consideration made as to the utilisation of the servers within the data centre consequently it might be possible to achieve 'good' power efficiency numbers but have low server utilisation and hence not extracting the most workload out of the data centre. Here in EMEA we have initiated a Data Centre Efficiency Award to try and start to get a handle how best to identify DCs that are running best practices and delivering of power and utilisation efficiency.

 

I guess the question at the end of the day is do you consider that your Data Centre is efficient and how are you quantifying this efficiency ?

0 Comments Permalink Tags: benchmark, datacenter_efficiency, eco-technology, performance, server, server_room, virtualization, xeon, quad, core, power
Chris P_Intel
0

 

Watt do you care about more?

the Power Consumption of your servers (watts) or the Power Efficiency of your servers (performance / watt)

... or maybe you prefer the Performance per Watt per SqFt argument

 

 

 

I have spent a lot of my time the last several years discussing this topic with IT professionals around the world - and there are a lot of varying opinions.

 

 

I believe that Performance per Watt is a better measure of overall value for the data center and server room.

The power consumed by a server is an important measure, but power only comparisons can be misleading.

 

 

Example: If server ‘A' consumes 50W less power than server ‘B', then it can save IT $79 per year per server in power and cooling costs (assumes $0.08 kW/hr power costs and cooling costs equal to power costs). Scale that $79 savings per server across a data center with thousands of servers and it can be a pretty impressive number.

 

 

However, if a server with 50W lower power delivers lower application performance ... is the power savings worth it? The answer of course depends ... but generally in my experience the answer is a resounding No.

 

 

Example: What if server A (the 50W lower power server) underperforms server B by 33% in performance. This means that you need to deploy more ‘A' Servers to get the same performance as ‘B' Servers. In fact, with a 33% performance advantage, you need only 3 ‘B' servers for every 4 ‘A' servers. The higher performance per Watt delivered by server B reduces acquisition costs, reduces power consumption (less servers) and minimizes space and eases manageability. This example is shown graphically above

 

 

What do you think? What power and performance metrics do you look at before purchasing servers

... Lower Power or Higher Performance per Watt?

 

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: benchmark, computing, datacenter, performance, energy_efficiency, servers, xeon, power, roi, tco
Lorie Wigle
0

Eco-Technology - what does this term mean and why would Intel use it instead of "Green Computing" or something more common?

 

Moore's Law gives us the ability to deliver more performance and greater energy efficiency with each generation of microprocessors - and reducing the energy consumption of our products is far and away the biggest impact Intel can have on carbon footprint.

 

We recently completed an analysis of a high-performance computing configuration that was originally deployed in 2002 (coming in at number 17 in the Top500 Supercomputer list for that year) and is still in use today. This configuration consists of 512 servers fit out into 25 racks using 128 kW and delivers 3.68 TFlops peak on the LINPACK benchmark. Today, that cluster could be replaced with a single rack of roughly 53 blade servers drawing 21 kW and still giving us that 3.7 TFlops of performance (Energy efficiency in the data center). More on whether that level of density is appropriate for everyone later.....

 

 

Think of the incredible increase in productivity - and new innovations - that have been made possible by this phenomenal growth in compute capacity. The explosion of information that's available at our fingertips and the evolution of many aspects of our global economy to bits instead of physical materials.

 

 

And that's really the point of "Eco-Technology" which is defined as an "eco-sensitive" approach to technology that takes into consideration sustainability in both manufacture and end-use of technology.

 

 

So we're increasing both the energy efficiency of our products and we're eliminating potentially harmful materials such as lead and halogen from our manufacturing, but we're also as an industry continuing to contribute to productivity and transformation. Both are important.

 

As companies explore their IT Sustainability programs and we all work to define what green computing should mean, what are your thoughts on how to balance the imperative to do more work, deliver more business value with the rising costs of energy and our collective desire to slow climate change? The US Environmental Protection Agency is contemplating Energy Star for servers. If you were in charge, what criteria would you use to award the label?

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: eco-technology, green_computing, hpc, performance, top500, linpack, eco-sesitive, datacenter, server_room, 45nm, xeon, moore's_law
Vishal Sanghvi
1

Before, there were few things and they were simple. There were few roads to take, few choices at hand, few decisions to make - so most of the time we could find a solution that would fit easily with our needs. Now, there are a lot of things and they are complex. I am not sure but did Lorie or Shannon ever imagine that we would need a search engine to search through the Internet 20 years ago?

 

How did we get here? - I think as humans, we love new ideas, new experiences, and new perspectives. So we build new things, we innovate, we create, we add value. As technologists, we know that innovations get complex.

 

But the real question is where do we go from here?

 

It sounds to me like we need to re-learn the concept of "fit" and "choice" all over again. Because simply put, to find the right fit from the myriad of choices is a lot of work these days. Our tech background makes us great pattern matchers. We think we know what fits perfectly for our needs. But do we really?

 

 

At Intel, my job is to figure out what matters to enterprise applications and its relationship to platform performance. Some applications "fit" perfectly with the architecture. Some applications do not "fit" with our architecture. I work closely with the software teams within Intel as well as software vendors that run enterprise applications. I have learnt that evaluating systems is not as simple as it might seem. Because computer performance depends on the workload, it is necessary to understand just what your needs are so that you can make correct trade-offs.

 

 

There are a lot of performance numbers out there. Just because one set of numbers might not make sense it does not mean that you cannot find out what is right for you. See all the numbers; make your own calculations. Find your "fit". Understand your trade-offs and choose well

 

 

By the way, I am piling up a stack of enterprise application "must haves" - scalability, reliability, performance per watt. When the server room came to life I said wow, here is an opportunity to share and learn from our customers their needs better.

 

 

Stay tuned for what I think matters in world of performance analysis, benchmarking, enterprise applications and some case studies.

 

 

1 Comments Permalink Tags: application, benchmark, performance, vishal_sanghvi, computing
Shannon Poulin
5

Leading up to the launch of our 45nm processors I was often asked "what does this technology mean to my business?" or "what does it mean to me as a consumer?" My usual responses of improved performance, better performance/watt and better price/performance were all very true. But as I write this I am challenged to find more depth to that response. The solutions that you, the technology industry, collectively deliver include software, hardware and luckily for Intel processors that are now based on 45nm technology. We are on a line that is sloping up and to the right with respect to being able to deliver more performance over time. But so what? How can we look at single points on that line and reflect on their significance?

 

There are a number of examples where things start our revolutionary and simply evolve from there; flying, combustion engine automobile travel, the Internet, One day you walked/wagon/horse from place to place the next day you drove. One day you drove, the next day you flew. One day you wrote a letter, the next day an email. All of these had some groundwork that lead up to them for sure, but the new normal existed the day they became ubiquitous. Writing letters, putting a stamp on it and dropping it in a mailbox is now a lost art that we teach kids while we also explain to them what cassette tapes, rabbit ears and wired Ethernet are.

 

When was there enough performance, with low enough power and at a low enough price point for me to buy a handheld global positioning sensor unit that I can use to go geocaching with my kids? Clearly it wasn't ten years ago since I suspect the device may have existed for the military but wasn't quite portable enough for me or at a low enough price point to catch my eye. I am sure everyone can remember the first cell phones which looked like a car battery with a phone stuck on top. There are countless examples of points on a price/perf/power curve that lead to evolutionary or revolutionary products that change the way people live, work or play.

 

These new 45nm components are compelling and surely enterprise customers are going to find that they can run databases faster, develop software quicker and process transactions faster. Financial services companies will use these new products to execute faster trades. That in turn will allow them to win share against their competitors who are slower and it will reflect on their bottom line. Oil and gas companies will use these new products to more efficiently search for, locate and model the size of energy reserves. Search companies will use these products to ranks pages, target online consumers and drive advertising based commerce. Those things are evolutionary and allow companies to improve what they are already doing.

 

What are the revolutionary things that we will look back on and say "without the price/perf/watt that 45nm processors delivered in November 2007 xxx would not be possible?" Are you working on it? The technologies we develop are constantly looking to improve the present while also keeping an eye on the future. They are optimized for you, the developers and consumers, because quite frankly we are fascinated with what you are doing today and very interested in what you are going to do tomorrow with all of the high performing low power products that we are launching this month.

 

One last thing, if you're working on the next Google like revolutionary online platform drop me a note. I might want to alter my investment strategy J

5 Comments Permalink Tags: processors, xeon, 45nm, shannon_poulin, server, performance
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