Evaluation of the SUN UltraSparc T2+ Processor for Computational Science

Abstract. The Sun UltraSparc T2+ processor was designed for throughput com-puting 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 mem-ory subsystem). To recognise the capabilities of the T2+ processor we com-pare 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 in-vestigate whether the current generation of massive chip multithreading proces-sors is capable of providing competitive performance for non-server workloads in scientific applications