Event

POWER6: Now in India

IBM’s latest chip is now available in India bringing the twin benefits of more horsepower and granular energy efficiency. By Prashant L Rao

The POWER6, IBM’s latest microprocessor had been launched globally earlier in the year. It’s now been launched in India as well. Big Blue simultaneously announced the availability of the System p570 server and the BladeCenter JS22 powered by the new chip. The chip sports beefed up virtualization and energy efficiency options.

At the Indian launch in Maldives, Shashi B Mal, Director, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/SA kicked off the proceedings with an announcement, “In Q3 2007, IDC ranked us the leading server vendor in India both in UNIX and SIAS. We have 40% of the market for UNIX servers and 30% of x86.”

Next, Anil Khopkar, General Manager, MIS, Bajaj Auto, the first user of the POWER6 processor in India, launched a coffee table book about the history of the POWER microarchitecture.

Jyoti Satyanathan, VP - IBM India / SA reminded the audience of CIOs and journalists of Blue Gene, the IBM supercomputer that had beaten Kasparov and said that, “The POWER6 is four times as powerful as the Blue Gene. We have comes this far in eight years.”

Mal talked about energy efficiency in the data center. “We are at a tipping point. While energy efficiency was not a hot topic 12 to 15 months back, it has become one now.”

He went on to explain that although everyone was concerned about energy efficiency, most CIOs do not have data on how much energy their data centers consume. Mal’s rough estimate put power consumption per CPU at Rs 5,000 per day. He went on to say that in India it was the cost of acquisition that got more attention as Indian CIOs were busy managing growth. In Europe and the US, where growth was in single digits, managing cost was given greater importance.

Mal talked about how IBM uses its own technology stating that IBM is the biggest user of Lotus Notes with over 350,000 users each with a 1 GB mailbox. It is also one of the largest SAP sites and it has the largest intranet and Web sites.

By adopting Linux on mainframes, IBM has reduced the number of servers that it uses from 3,900 to 30 mainframes. This has been accompanied by a 80% drop in energy consumption. The company has gone from maintaining 155 data centers to just seven.

Coming to the Indian market, early adopters of the POWER6 include Bajaj Auto, HDFC Bank and ABB whose end-user response time shrank to less than 600 ms with the adoption of the POWER6.

What lies beneath

Manish Gupta from IBM’s India Systems and Technology Lab spoke about the underlying technology. He said, “We found a way to double the clock frequency without doubling the power consumption.”

He went on to talk about massive parallelism in the POWER7, 8 and 9. Coming back to the POWER6, he discussed the 4 MB L2 cache for each core and stated that the chip could execute seven instructions per clock cycle in theory. Of course, in the real world it’s more like one per 3.5 cycles which is still good performance today. He discussed the Memory Wall problem wherein processor speed has been growing at 60% per year while memory speed has lagged behind growing only about 6% a year. “80% of the time, the CPU is waiting for data,” said Gupta. Apparently only one percent of data is accessed directly from the DRAM. The rest is from the L1/L2 caches.

POWER6 in India

Satyanathan said that ABB, HDFC Bank and Bajaj Auto received early shipments of POWER6 gear in June 2007. When asked if customers were running Linux on the platform, he said, “It’s mostly AIX.”

The most significant change in the POWER6 according to IBM are:

1. Double the clockspeed
2. The ability to move live partitions

The company says that the chip is good for HPC, commercial, application and database workloads. On an unmodified commercial workload, moving from the POWER5 to the POWER6 is supposed to result in a 30% performance improvement. In the test case cited, removing I/O bottlenecks resulted in performance shooting up by 75%. Bajaj Auto saw its CPU count for running SAP drop and response time reduce from 2 seconds to less than a second.

Mal said, “Batch processing still exists at banks and insurance companies. The latter have to do their processing once a month and there are cases of banks opening at 10 AM simply because their End-of-Day processing does not get done till then.”

POWER6 users in the country include MetLife, Aviva, Bajaj Group (Auto, Capital, Allianz), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, GMR Infrastructure (SAP), Dabur (Health, Beauty and Retail stores).

Satyanathan talked about the next chip from the POWER stable, saying, “We have committed the POWER7 to two customers as a sale by 2010-11.”

Mal commented that IBM’s new business is coming from SMBs. He hastened to add that growth was coming from growing workloads at existing clients. Citing the difference between older and newer customers, he said, “Our older customers had an IT team. The newer ones do not have the time. They prefer to buy bundles.” IBM has several application-hardware bundles including ERP and database.

Talking about how the power management is done on the POWER6, Gupta said, “Power Executive ships as an extension to IBM Director. It’s also available on our blades. By using Power Executive you can cap power consumption at certain levels based on the time of the day or dynamic policies to reduce power consumption.”

Lastly, the IBM team talked about virtualization in general and their version of it in particular. Gupta said, “We offer greater scalability and larger partitions.” Mal added, “There’s less overhead in our implementation. If you look at Intel and AMD they are working on their own extensions to reduce overhead. We already have that.”

prashant.rao@expressindia.com