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Is your code ready for the next wave in commodity computing?

Prepare yourself for multicore processing

By Humphrey Sheil, JavaWorld.com, 07/10/06

Page 3 of 7

Sun

Sun has truly embraced the power of parallel computing on the server, and their current line-up of T1 (Niagara) and planned T2 (Rock) systems reflects this. Sun has been producing high-end servers long before the T1-based family of course, but the T1 really starts to deliver on the promise of parallel hardware as a commodity.

Unfortunately, the T1 has a flaw, which is only addressed in the T2—poor parallel floating-point operation support. So if you need this feature, the T1 is not for you. But it's ideal if you want to use the T1 in a classic Web server setting. Apart from this weakness, the T1 offers up to 32 truly independent threads by using an eight-core CPU with each core able to handle four different active thread contexts.

IBM

Of all the hardware vendors considered here, IBM has arguably one of the most potent offerings with its Cell processor (developed in conjunction with Sony and Toshiba), providing the multicore brawn inside the Sony PlayStation 3, or PS3. The Cell processor is essentially a POWER5 CPU that uses eight more processing units to burn through the massive number of vector and floating-point operations needed to render video games.

More mainstream, IBM's main offering is the dual-core POWER5+ CPU, with POWER6 scheduled for delivery in 2007 (probably also dual-core). Core for core, most industry observers say that a POWER CPU is much faster than the competition. Like Sun, IBM has significant experience (including mainframe technology) to bring to bear on the engineering problems inherent in building multicore CPUs. Interestingly, with the Cell forming part of the Sony PS3, IBM is uniquely placed to put its parallel hardware in tens of millions of homes over the next decade—an interesting point to ponder for client-side programmers.

Putting it all together: A taxonomy

In much the same way as Michael J. Flynn proposed a classification scheme for parallel architectures in 1966, we can get a good view of how the various hardware models stack up against each other if we can produce a taxonomy for the current mainstream processing components (where component is a high-level term describing how that vendor has implemented its parallel hardware strategy). The primary decision for this map was to decide on the axes for the model—I chose to use number of cores per processing component, or CPU, and the power of those cores, tentatively based on clock speed (I know that this is a generalization, and some vendors will balk at it, but an in-depth benchmarking of each vendor offering is not this article's main purpose). A more detailed examination of per-core performance would be expanded to examine memory bandwidth and latency, pipelining, and other techniques.

In any event, the map makes one clear point—Sun has a unique offering at the moment in the market. In fact, my own subjective opinion on the current state of play is that Sun has the best offering, especially when considered from a Java architect's point of view. The combination of T1 hardware providing 32 hardware threads, the Java 5 VM, and Solaris 10 as a bullet-proof OS is hard to resist in the enterprise space. The price is compelling too. The only fly in the ointment is the weak FPU support. What if one of the core frameworks I use suddenly introduces a feature that exposes this weakness in the T1? The Rock iteration of the T1 addresses this weakness, as does the Niagara 2 to a certain extent.