MQSeries.net :: View topic - Some things you may not know about POWER7

lancelotlinc · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:37 am Post subject:

Features & Benefits of Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC (POWER) version 7

POWER7 has its roots in an IBM research and development project in 1974 to enable a telephone switch to be able to handle 300 calls per second. Thus, from the get-go, the focus of the whole enchilada was performance. This beginning found its way into another project in 1982 code-named 'Cheetah', another euphamism for high performance, lean and mean. POWER1 was launched in 1990 and efforts were made to create a hybrid AS/400 that could run both AIX and OS/400.

The year 2010 brought POWER7, featuring new capabilities using multiple cores and multiple CPU threads, creating a pool of virtual CPUs. Typical IBM POWER7 processor has eight cores, and four threads per core, for a total capacity of 32 simultaneous threads, or 32 virtual CPUs per processor circuit while still using the same electricity consumption as the POWER6 processor circuit which could only support 8 virtual CPUs. The typcial POWER7 processor unit has 1.2 billion transistors and is 567 mm2 large fabricated on a 45 nm process. POWER7 can execute instructions out-of-order instead of in-order, by implementing an aggressive out-of-order instruction set which drives highly efficient use of available execution paths. The POWER7 processor has an Instruction Sequence Unit that is capable of dispatching up to six instructions per cycle to a set of queues. Up to eight instructions per cycle can be issued to the Instruction Execution units.

POWER7 processor circuits sport two 4-channel DDR3 memory controllers, for a total of 8 channels of memory and 100GBps total memory bandwidth. System design has given POWER7-based systems a multipath communications channel of 360GBps (GigaBytes not gigabits) to neighboring CPUs, enabling very high-speed communication between processors. This enables multi-terabyte memory address range and page table access to support global petabyte shared memory space for POWER7 clusters so that software developers can program a cluster as if it were a single system, without using message passing. AIX 7 includes a new built-in clustering capability called Cluster Aware AIX. Administrators can use this new capability to cluster a pool of AIX nodes. By default, AIX V7.1 pins kernel memory and includes support to allow applications to pin their kernel stack. Pinning kernel memory and the kernel stack for applications with real-time requirements can provide performance improvements by ensuring that the kernel memory and kernel stack for an application is not paged out.

POWER7 systems include the Active Memory Expansion feature, which increases system flexibility where you can configure logical partitions (LPARs) to use less physical memory. For example, an LPAR running AIX appears to the OS applications be configured with 80 GB of physical memory but the hardware actually only consumes 60 GB of physical memory. Active Memory Expansion employs memory compression technology to transparently compress in-memory data, allowing more data to be placed into memory and thus expanding the memory capacity of POWER7 systems. Utilizing Active Memory Expansion can improve system utilization and increase a systemâ€™s throughput. AIX 7 automatically manages the size of memory pages used to automatically use 4K, 64K or a combination of those page sizes. This self-tuning feature results in optimized performance without administrative effort.

AIX 7 offers a wide range of system interoperability features and open source tools to enable LinuxÂ® applications to be recompiled and run in a native AIX 7 environment. AIX affinity with Linux can promote faster and less costly deployment of multiplatform, integrated solutions. Many solutions developed for Linux will run on AIX 7 with a simple recompilation of the source code. IBM provides the AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications, which is a collection of open source and GNU software commonly found with Linux distributions. Because the applications run on AIX, businesses can combine the ﬂexibility of Linux with the advanced features of AIX 7, including advanced workload management, sophisticated systems management tools, scalability and security.
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