Sun Microsystems T5120 Enterprise-Class Software, CMT Awareness, Fine-Granularity Manageability

28 Enterprise-Class Software Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 4

Enterprise-Class Software

New technology often requires time for tools and applications to arrive, and delivering agile and highly-available services that take advantage of available resources requires stable development tools, operating systems, middleware and management software. Fortunately, in spite of the breakthrough UltraSPARC T2 processor technology, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers provide full binary compatibility with earlier SPARC systems and are delivered ready to run with pre-loaded tools and the solid foundation of the Solaris OS. Moreover, these systems are provided with a wealth of sophisticated tools that let organizations develop and tune applications as they consolidate and manage workloads while effectively utilizing the resources of the UltraSPARC T2 processor.

Scalability and Support for CoolThreads Technology

The Solaris 10 Operating System is specifically designed to deliver the considerable resources of UltraSPARC T2 processor based systems. In fact, the Solaris 10 OS provides key functionality for virtualization, optimal utilization, high availability, unparalleled security, and extreme performance for both vertically and horizontally scaled environments. The Solaris 10 OS runs on a broad range of SPARC and x86-based systems and compatibility with existing applications is guaranteed.

One of the most attractive features of systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor is that they appear as a familiar SMP system to the Solaris OS and the applications it supports. In addition, the Solaris 10 OS has incorporated many features to improve application performance on CMT architectures:

•CMT Awareness

The Solaris 10 OS is aware of the UltraSPARC T2 processor hierarchy so that the scheduler can effectively balance the load across all the available pipelines. Even though it exposes the UltraSPARC T2 processor as 64 logical processors, the Solaris OS understands the correlation between cores and the threads they support, and provides a fast and efficient thread implementation.

•Fine-Granularity Manageability

For the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the Solaris 10 OS has the ability to enable or disable individual cores and threads (logical processors). In addition, standard Solaris OS features such as processor sets provide the ability to define a group of logical processors and schedule processes or threads on them.

•Binding Interfaces

The Solaris OS allows considerable flexibility in that processes and individual threads can be bound to either a processor or a processor set, if required or desired.