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February 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun speeds networking for multi-core chips
As the microprocessor industry has shifted focus away from raw megahertz in favor of multiple cores and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), developers and IT managers have struggled to adapt to the new computing paradigm. Adding more cores is all well and good, but until the other components of the IT environment directly support multithreading, some of the touted performance gains remain largely hypothetical.
No company understands SMP as well as Sun Microsystems, having invested heavily in the technology since the 1990s. Sun's current UltraSparc T1 chips are the most multithreaded processor designs in the mainstream server market. Now Sun has turned its eye toward bringing network hardware up to speed with its new chip designs.
The Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology, announced today, is the first networking hardware optimized specifically for parallel threaded environments, according to Sun spokespeople. By comparison, most current network hardware was designed to work with single-core, single-threaded processors, which creates a bottleneck in multi-core hardware. Sun's new design should benefit network-intensive applications, such as server virtualization or storage networking over iSCSI, running on multi-core x86 and Sparc processors.
The new network interfaces are available now, starting at $498 per port.
Posted by Neil McAllister on February 21, 2007 01:03 PM
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Systems Tunning:
Iam all for SMPs & Dual-Core-Processors. But one question. How is the bandwidth over MPLS Trunks whereby servers,workstations, routers, & switches are using gigabyte spd. ports & transmission environment configured for one to ten gigabytes per second?>...
Doug, for starters, double check your suffixes! We're talking about gigaBIT networks here, not gigaBYTE. Ten gigabyte Ethernet doesn't exist yet. Ten gigabit Ethernet is about 1/10 the speed that a ten gigabyte network would be.
That said, the purpose of this hardware is to reduce the bottlenecks within a single system, rather than across a network. Imagine you have a multi-core processor running several virtual machines, but all of them are trying to communicate through a single network interface that thinks it's connected to a single processor. The new Sun hardware offloads more of the processing to the network interface, which allows the various threads to avoid queuing up as they wait to access the network.
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