I just noticed that newcomer 3Leaf Systems posted some very impressive SPECjbb benchmarks for their upcoming Dynamic Data Center servers, which has nabbed them the #1 spot in the overall SPECjbb list - beating the closest rival by a factor of 2 and setting a new world record.

I'm not normally one to get too excited about benchmarks, but what is interesting is the sheer game-changing performance characteristics of the platform, especially when you factor in the cost considering that the platform is based on industry standard hardware and software.

Startup 3Leaf Systems is essentially a pioneer of technologies that enable dynamic clouds, enabling industray standard systems to dynamically scale up or down on demand.

I came across 3Leaf a number of years ago when they published an article on a revolutionary design using silicon ASIC design and software for an I/O virtualisation product for X86 servers back a few years ago that would promise to allow for the virtualisation of multiple CPUs from hundreds of servers and the ability to create virtual symmetric multiprocessors from a pool of installed processor cores. For the first time, the technology allows a guest operating system to span multiple cpu cores, and many physical servers to deliver unparalleled levels of efficiency.

The 3Leaf ASIC resides on the motherboard itself and enables memory coherence across the clusters fabric (Ethernet or InfiniBand). Their hope is to create mainframe-class availability and unparalleled lexibility from commodity servers by virtualising memory, CPU, and I/O resources while at the same time significaly reducing costs.

For the past year, 3Leaf clusters have been in the hands of a select number of beta customers, and the recent SPECjbb benchmarks are a result of customer demand during this testing.

These new results will be of interest to anyone with an existing HPC environment, where the costs are traditionally very high. 3Leaf is setting it's sights to compete against proprietary top of the line SMP offerings such as the IBM Power 595 and HP Superdome 9000, but it will be interesting where else these systems pop up within the infrastructure over the next few years.

Currently supported operating systems include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Enterprise Server. Microsoft Windows 2008 support is apparently destined for later next year.

3Leaf Systems are currently building their initial AMD-based systems today, but their strategy long term is to develop OEM relationships with the likes of IBM, DELL and HP to try and take this technology to market in addition to their existing x86 server lineups.

Definitely one to watch.......

The Results

From the figures below in the chart, a 3Leaf Systems DCC system delivers more performance than the closest SGI offering with 256 cores of Intel Itanium muscle. The system benchmarked using AMD Opteron processors had half the number of JVM instances, half the number of cores, and a quarter less chips. Interesting to note the IBM flagship Power6 based p565 taking up 6th position with 64 cores and 32 chips.

On a per JVM basis, the 3Leaf offering pumped out an impressive 172,945BOPS.