Chapter 1
The Evolution of Chip Multithreading (CMT)
By any measure, Sun’s first-generation CMT processors were an unprecedented success. Sun Fire™ / Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology won enthusiastic praise, and generated the fastest product ramp in Sun’s history. Delivering up to five times the throughput in a quarter of the space and power, these systems even garnered the first ever rebate from a power utility1 — a trend that is being repeated across the world. Now CMT technology is evolving rapidly to meet the constantly changing demands of a wide range of Web and other applications.
Business Challenges for Web 2.0
Marked by the prevalence of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), the emerging Participation Age promises the ability to deliver rich new content and high- bandwidth services to larger numbers of users than ever before. Through this transition, organizations across many industries hope to address larger markets, reduce costs, and gain better insights into their customers. At the same time, an increasingly broad array of wired and wireless client devices are bringing network computing into the everyday lives of millions of people. These trends are redefining datacenter scalability and capacity requirements, even as they collide with fundamental real estate, power, and cooling constraints.
•Building out for Web Scale
Web scale applications engender a new pace and urgency to infrastructure deployment. Organizations must accelerate time to market and time to service, while delivering scalable high-quality and high-performance applications and services. Many need to be able to start small with the ability to scale very quickly, with new customers and innovative new Web services often implying a doubling of capacity in months rather than years.
At the same time, organizations must reduce their environmental impact by working within the power, cooling, and space available in their current datacenters. Operational costs too are receiving new scrutiny, along with system administrative costs that can account for up to 40 percent of an IT budget. Simplicity and speed are paramount, giving organizations the ability to respond quickly to dynamic business conditions. Organizations are also striving to eliminate vendor lock-in as they look to preserve previous, current, and future investments. Open platforms built around open standards help provide maximum flexibility while reducing costs of both entry and exit.
1.In August of 2006, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) began offering a substantial energy rebate for purchasing and deploying Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers