HP Unix Behemoth Squeaks By IBM Big Iron on TPC Test

Published: March 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has taken much forging of iron and tweaking of operating systems and database software, but Hewlett-Packard has finally surpassed IBM in taking over the top spot on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test. This is a day that HP and its chip partner, Intel, have been working toward for many years. And, thanks to the delays in the delivery of the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors and the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system, the Superdome server may not hold that top spot for very long.

Not unless IBM's Power6-based servers, which are due some time this year, are substantially delayed, anyway.

The TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test has been used for more than a decade to gauge the throughput of database and application servers that support relatively simple transaction processing workloads. While the TPC-C test will soon be replaced by the TPC-E OLTP test, which is designed to address some of the shortcomings of the TPC-C workload and the benchmark methodology that is enforced among the vendors who use it for competitive purposes is nonetheless one of the few independent metrics for assessing the performance of a server and getting some sense of what it might cost to build a system that supports a given workload. (You can read about the TPC-E test here.)

In any event, HP wants to focus on the TPC-C test today, since it has managed to just barely beat IBM's best result to date with its high-end System p5 595 AIX-based RISC/Unix servers running its own DB2 database. Both vendors have been struggling to break through the 4 million transactions per minute (TPM) barrier with their biggest boxes; IBM did it last year with a 32 of its Power5+ processors, and now HP has done it with 64 of Intel's Itanium 9000 chips.

The HP Superdome that was used in the TPC-C test had 64 of the dual-core Montecito chips, which have two virtual threads per core thanks to the integration of HyperThreading by Intel at the last minute in the Montecito design. That gives the Superdome machine 256 software threads to play with in total. The Itanium 9050 processors have 12 MB of L3 cache per core and run at 1.6 GHz. The Superdome box was configured with 2 TB of main memory and a mind-boggling 360 TB of disk capacity (over 504 StorageWorks MSA 1000 arrays, in fact). On the software front, the HP box ran the new HP-UX 11i v3 operating system, which was just launched a few weeks ago, as well as Oracle's 10g Release 10 database and BEA Systems' Tuxedo 8.0 middleware. The whole shebang, including three years of maintenance, cost $21.2 million, and was able to process 4,092,799 TPM on the TPC-C test. After various hardware and software discounts were applied, HP reduced the price tag by 43 percent to just under $12 million, resulting in a cost of $2.93 per TPM.

IBM's best result to date on its System p5 595 server is a transaction rate of 4,033,378 TPM on a machine configured with 32 dual-core Power5+ chips running at 2.3 GHz. The Power5+ chips, like the Itanium 9000s, support simultaneous multithreading, albeit a different kind from Intel's HyperThreading, which means the IBM box had a total of 128 threads for software to run on. The IBM server used in the TPC-C test, which was reported in late January, was configured with 2 TB of main memory and 220 TB of disk capacity. The machine ran AIX V5.3, the latest iteration of IBM's Unix, which was launched in 2005, as well as its DB2 V9 database, which came out last year. The IBM setup cost $26.3 million, but IBM cut the price by 54 percent on this box and dropped the price down to--yup, you guessed it--just under $12 million. When you do the math, IBM's machine cost $2.97 per TPM.

While IBM and HP are neck-and-neck on the TPC-C test, only a few weeks ago a similar Integrity box was tested on the SAP Sales and Distribution (S&D) benchmark test, and the Superdome with Montecitos cleanly beat the p5 595 boxes with the Power5+ chips. The HP box supported 30,000 users, while the IBM machine only supported 23,456 users.

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