Evaluation of the SUN UltraSparc T2+ Processor for Computational Science

The Sun UltraSparc T2+ processor was designed for throughput computing and thread level parallelism. In this paper we evaluate its suitability for computational science. A set of benchmarks representing typical building blocks of scientific applications and a real-world hybrid MPI/OpenMP code for ocean simulation are used for performance evaluation. Additionally we apply micro benchmarks to evaluate the performance of certain components (such as the memory subsystem). To recognise the capabilities of the T2+ processor we compare its performance with the IBM POWER6 processor. While the UltraSparc T2+ is targeted on server workloads with high throughput requirements via low-frequency core design and massive chip multithreading capabilities, the ultra-high frequency core design of the IBM POWER6 optimised for instruction-level parallelism follows a contrary approach. The intention of this evaluation is to investigate whether the current generation of massive chip multithreading processors is capable of providing competitive performance for non-server workloads in scientific applications.