SGI's aggressive push breaks the boundaries of JVM performance

SGI showed of their brand new Altix UV 1000 system, letting it be known that they have broken the current record for performance on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s SPECjbb2005 benchmark, a standard measurement of Java-based application performance.

Benchmarks are often broken, and are not always a good guide for real world performance. But with this annoucement (and similar ones from Sun, IBM etc.) we have seen that high density, multi-core servers are certainly in an upward trend. SGI's Altix UV 1000 is certainly densly packed. With 256 cores, SGI beat Fujitsu/Sun by 60 percent with a single Oracle Java HotSpot JVM performance of 2,818,350 BOPS. These high end server are powered by up to 32 eight-core Intel® Xeon® X7560 processors, although it should be noted that serious cooling is required.

We look forward to getting into the lab soon for our own performance tests.