Last week, Phil sent me
an email about Sun Microsystem’s new
T2000 series
of servers, based on their Niagara core. Basically, this is a 4, 6, or 8
core system, each of which can execute up to four threads in parallel. It’s
supposed to be great for highly threaded, low FPU applications — like
web serving and database serving.
As part of their promotion, they’re doing this cool Try before you Buy thing. Basically,
you given them your information, they send you a server free for 60 days — they
even cover postage. You evaluate it, if you like it, you pay for it. If it
doesn’t work well for your field, send it back — once again, on Sun’s dime. Pretty cool stuff. What’s cooler, is that according to Jonathan Schwartz, they’re looking for people to benchmark these guys. Specifically, if you
do a good enough job on the writeup, they may let you keep it.
So, being the graduate student I am, I immediately realized a couple of
different applications that I’d like to work on with this little guy. Firstly,
we’re going to see how well he works as a spyware monitoring box — run multiple
instances of snort on him and a database to log everything to. Should be
kinda interesting to see. Secondly, I’m going to try and use it for some of
my network analysis stuff. Specifically, seeing if it’s faster to run ORA on
it, or at the very least what’s the overall throughput.
I’m a little skeptical about it’s performance on some of the measures in ORA
because the cores share an FPU. However, the integer measures should run quite
nicely. I’ll also put it through the mixer by running Automap on a large amount
of text obtained from some of my open source reserach to evaluate how it’s able
to build a network based on all that data.
So if folks from Sun are reading this, please
let me get the machine. I’ve got real research to be doing here, and I’m even
willing put down that I got cool hardware from Sun in my papers. It’ll be even
cooler if you let me keep the box. Here’s hoping for some interesting results
once it ships!