HP Integrity Running HP-UX Pushes Largest TPC-H Database

Published: June 21, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's a long time between now and when Intel will have its quad-core "Tukwila" Itanium processors to market and not too long before IBM will get its high-performance Power6 processors into the field in its System p servers. So Hewlett-Packard has a window of opportunity now to show how its "Arches" chipset combined with the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors do supporting some of the biggest workloads out there.

HP has taken its top-end Integrity Superdome server, equipped with the Arches chipset and 64 of the 1.6 GHz/18 MB cache Montecito chips, tossed on the relatively new HP-UX 11i v3 version of its Unix operating system, and added the Oracle 10g R2 update to its relational database. Then, it ran the first TPC-H data warehousing benchmark against a 30 TB database size. Up until now, the largest database that anyone tried to push on the TPC-H test was 10 TB, and only IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems weighed in on that test. IBM's cluster of 16 of its p5 575 servers, each with eight Power5+ cores running at 2.2 GHz, was able to crank through 180,108 queries per hour (QPH) at a cost of $47 per QPH; this machine ran AIX 5.3 and DB2 8.2. An HP Superdome with 128 cores using Montecito chips and running the same HP-UX and Oracle software stack was able to 171,380 QPH at a cost of $33 per QPH, while a Sun E25K server tested at the end of 2005 running Solaris 10 and Oracle 10g R2--with 72 of Sun's 1.5 GHz UltraSparc-IV+ processors (that's 144 cores) was only able to push 108,100 QPH on the 10 TB database size in the TPC-H test, and cost $54 per QPH.

For the most recent 30 TB test, HP seems to be trying to entice IBM to prove the mettle of its current System p5 595 servers, which have 32 of the current dual-core Power5+ chips, which run at 2.3 GHz, or to put out benchmark tests using the Power6 processors, which are expected to run at near 5 GHz in p5 595-class machines when they ship later this year. In any event, on the 30 TB test, the Superdome setup was able to push 150,961 QPH at a cost of $47 per QPH. And that is the number that IBM now has to beat. It will be interesting to see if IBM puts out a 16-node cluster of its new System p 560 servers with AIX 5.3 and DB2 9.1 using the Power6 chips on the 30 TB test, just to show that it can beat a Superdome. Thus far, IBM has shied away from the TPC-C online transaction processing test as well as the TPC-H test to show the muscle in this System p 560 box.

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