SUMMARY: Solaris 8 02/04 on a huge (48+ cores) E25K domain.

Hello everyone,

Here's the summary for this thread:

I got a few e-mails but they either misunderstood the problem ("It's 
supported so it should work") or they tought Solaris 9, ia64 or IBM's P5 
were an option (remember when I said "s8 is a requirement for this app")?

Here's what I have gathered:

- SUN states that they will not 'recommend' Solaris 8 on more than 24 
cores (that's 3 US-IV system boards, people). What 'recommends' mean is 
left as an exercise for the reader.

- We have an application that uses 38 1200Mhz US-IV cores under Solaris 8 
on an E25K but we know it slows to a crawl if we enable the last two 
(disabled) cpu's (reaching 40 cores). Even SUN experts have been 
ineffective at tuning the domain to solve the performance problems (might 
be caused by the application too)..

- If your requirement is Solaris 8 -and- over 600,000+ Tpm-C, then your 
only solution is the Fujitsu PrimePower 1500/2500 servers. I asked 
Fujitsu-Siemens and they explicitly stated that they support Solaris 8 in 
a single domain of up to 128 * 2+ Ghz SPARC64V cpus. They even have 
benchmarks to prove 64 cores under Solaris 8 isn't a problem for them 
(http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103103101). I 
was also shown some more recent numbers where a single 64cpu Solaris 8 
domain reached over 850,000 Tpc-c on a PrimePower 2500 or over 1,300,000 
in a 128 cpu configuration.

Regards,

Vincent

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, vsc05.contact@cojot.name wrote:

>
> Hello everyone,
>
> 	We're planning on configuring a huge E25K domain running Solaris 8 
> (02/04). The domain will have 8 System Boards, each with 4 1350Mhz US-IV 
> processors. This will configure the domain at 8*4*2 = 64 cores.
>
> 	Since Solaris 8 does not have MPO (s8 is a requirement for this app), 
> we know that performance will be inferior to that of s9/s10 on the same 
> hardware.
>
> 	What we'd like to know is this: Will it work/function at all? Will it 
> provide adequate performance (we're looking for over 600,000 tpm-C). We heard 
> rumours about 'Solaris 8 cannot handle more than 40 cores on E25k' but not a 
> single document/fact was shown.
>
> 	I'd like to hear from anyone's experiences, good or bad (performance 
> wise), running Solaris 8 on a large E25K domain (48+ cores).
>
> Thanks for reading,
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