POWER5 blows the lid off of transaction processing benchmark
11/20/2004 8:30:14 PM, by Hannibal
Benchmarking really huge, multimillion dollar transaction processing systems is something of a black art. It's not like you like you can fire up SPEC and give the machine a workout. Mainframe systems, clusters, and the like are made for massive levels of concurrency, and they require a combination of compute power and bandwidth that can be difficult to benchmark fairly, especially at the level of whole systems.
Enter the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC [not, for whatever reason, TPPC]). Founded in 1988 to bring order to the chaos of the mainframe benchmarking scene, TPC is sort of like SPEC, but for mainframes. The group's main benchmark is TPC-C, and here's a quick description of it that I've culled from the much longer page at the TPC website:
As an OLTP system benchmark, TPC-C simulates a complete environment where a population of terminal operators executes transactions against a database. The benchmark is centered around the principal activities (transactions) of an order-entry environment. These transactions include entering and delivering orders, recording payments, checking the status of orders, and monitoring the level of stock at the warehouses.
A look at the Top 10 TPC-C scores shows IBM and HP trading the lead over the past year as each inches closer to the 1 million transactions per minute (tpmC) mark. HP's Integrity Superdome was the first to break through that barrier with a score of 1,008,144 tpmC submitted in November of '03. IBM followed suit in early '04 with a score of 1,025,486 tpmC reached by an eServer pSeries 690 system (POWER4-based). And then IBM busted out the POWER5.
On the 18th of this month, IBM used a tricked out, 64-way eServer p5 595 system to submit a record-shattering score of over 3.2 million tpmC. Some more details from IBM's press release:
On the crucial TPC-C benchmark test, the IBM eServer p5 595 and DB2 combination not only tripled the performance of the HP Integrity Superdome(1) but also posted a price/performance advantage of 37 percent to become the fastest computing processing solution ever.
To set the new TPC-C record, IBM leveraged the combined power of its POWER5 processor-based server -- the eServer p5 595 -- and IBM's leading-edge AIX 5L(TM)operating system and DB2, the industry's leading database.
That's a pretty serious leap in performance any way you slice it. And when you consider that the cost per transaction is quite low compared to HP's Superdome, IBM has really outdone themselves this time. So congrats to Dr. Pattnaik and the POWER5 team; I'm sure those guys are celebrating this achievement.
