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!