New IBM server achieves championship benchmark results

The IBM System p5 595 server announced today has seized the number one spot in five key industry benchmarks, demonstrating unmatched strength in both commercial and technical workloads. The dazzling performance underpins the flexibility of IBM’s Power Architecture technology, which serves as the foundation of systems ranging from video games to transaction processing machines to the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The quintet of IBM benchmark victories for the 64-core System p5 follows:

Transaction Processing – In the TPC-C benchmark, measuring the ability of a server to process complex online transactions and large volumes of business data the System p5 595 running a single instance of the IBM DB2 9 data server on the AIX 5L operating system and using IBM System Storage DS4800 processed 4,016,222 transactions per minute (tpmC) with a price/performance of $2.98/tpmC [1], versus the HP Integrity Superdome’s performance of 1,231,433 tpmC at $4.82/tpmC [1]. The TPC-C benchmark is an industry standard for measuring the ability of a system to process complex online transactions and large volumes of business data. The TPC-C benchmark is unique in the way it exercises all components of a system, including processors, memory, networking, storage, operating system and database software, demonstrating total system performance in a way that many of the other benchmarks touted by some competitors do not.

SAP – In the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application benchmark, the IBM System p5 595 running a single instance of the IBM DB2 9 data server and using IBM System Storage DS8300 achieved 23,456 Sales and Distribution Benchmark users versus Fujitsu-Siemens’s result of 21,000 Sales and Distribution Benchmark users. [2] This benchmark evaluates the performance of a single server running both the database and application for a Sales and Distribution environment using a standard application benchmark provided by SAP AG.

High Performance Computing – The one-core p5-595 achieved a world record result of 3,642 in the SPECfp2000 benchmark [3], a key yardstick of supercomputing performance, measuring how fast a single processor, cache, and memory can run a collection of 14 floating-point compute-intensive programs.

Parallel computing – The p5-595 achieved a result of 157,880 in the SPECompMpeak2001 [4], measuring a system's parallel processing capabilities for medium problem sizes using a suite of applications based on the OpenMP standards for shared-memory parallel processing. It is used to gauge effectiveness for high performance and technical computing.

Supersized parallel computing – The p5-595 achieved a result of 1,056,459 in the SPECompLpeak2001 [5], which measures a system's parallel processing capabilities for large problem sizes using a suite of applications based on the OpenMP standards for shared-memory parallel processing.