Techdocs Library > White papers > An Assessment of Leadership Performance with POWER6 Processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1

Document Author: Additional Author(s):	Bill Buros Elisabeth Stahl, Peter Wong, Chakarat Skawratananond, Daniel H Jones		Document ID:	WP101210
Doc. Organization:	Systems and Technology Group		Document Revised:	02/07/2008
Product(s) covered:	Linux; Power 6

Abstract: Compute-intensive performance is increasingly required for today’s high-performance environments. The IBM System p™ 570 with POWER6™ processors provides leadership performance and demonstrates excellent scalability moving from one node to four nodes in this environment while providing linear SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) scaling and growth for workloads similar to the metrics used here. This paper highlights the exceptional performance on IBM’s POWER6 processor-based systems running with the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1, based on recently audited published SPEC CPU2006 and SPECjbb2005 results, including single-system LINPACK metrics, on System p 570 4-core, 8-core and 16-core systems. With simultaneous multithreading (SMT) support turned on, Linux is easily able to provide effective scheduling support of the 32 processor threads seen on the 16-core 570 system. This paper discusses the impact of high performance computing on organizations, highlights POWER6 processor-based systems and Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions, and concludes with examples of simple software stack performance tuning considerations and recommendations for achieving leadership results with the Linux operating system and POWER6 processors.

Classification:	Hardware; Software	Category:	Performance
Platform(s):	IBM System p Family
O/S:	Linux	Keywords:	Linux, RHEL 5.1, POWER6, IBM System p 570, Performance, Compilers, SMP, SPECcpu2006, SPECjbb2005, Linpack, linhugetlbfs, IBM XL Compilers, IBM ESSL, FDPR-ori, Java