Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
3D Rendering Benchmarks
Mental Ray 3.3.1 (binary)
Just as Viewperf is our definitive synthetic benchmark, MentalRay has been our long time rendering standard. MentalRay was actually first developed on Sun machines during its early stages, and it's interesting to see that we have come full circle to testing MR on an x86_64 machine designed by Sun. Keep in mind, we are running the 32-bit binaries developed by Alias Wavefront. You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. We ran MentalRay via Maya using the command below:# maya_render_with_mr - file Benchmark_Mental.mb
MentalRay scales very nicely on the SMP Opteron machine. You will notice a 40% increase in performance from our single CPU Athlon FX-53 in our Linux CPU Roundup, although we are running a slightly newer kernel in this analysis.
POV-Ray 3.6 (binary & GCC 3.4.2)
Below, you can see how a non-commercial single CPU renderer performs on our machine. A separate add-on for POV-Ray, such as SMPOV, is needed to enable multiprocessor support. We ran two tests of POV-Ray here, the first being the 32-bit binary package from POVRay, and the second being the compiled binary. Obviously, the compiled binary defaults to 64-bit on systems capable of such.
Surprisingly, POV-Ray does OK on 32-bit Solaris 10, mildly outpacing the 32-bit Linux compilation. We could be in for a real treat when Solaris shows up on the x86_64 architecture.
YafRay 0.0.7 (binary)
Blender's raytracer, YafRay, constitutes another cornerstone of Linux workstation performance. We are only running the 32-bit YafRay binaries instead of compiling from source. We rendered the blurref sample included with Blender as follows:# time yafray blurref_sample.xml
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najames - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
I use a Sunfire V440 daily at work. It is a 4cpu large entry level server seen here.http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=...
I program daily on mainframe, Solaris, and PC. Benchmark programs I wrote took 38cpu seconds on the mainframe, 38cpu seconds on my PIII pc, 17cpu seconds on Solaris. Four programs submitted at once on the the mainframe took 38cpu seconds but wall time was hours, the PC choked, the Solaris server still did them in 17cpu seconds each in about the same wall time. The Solaris server didn't slow down, period. We have combined large programs that individualy would sometimes crash on the mainframe and the Solaris Unix server burns through them even with temp space going over 12gigs druing processing.
If the Sun Opteron server is anything like my little Sunny, they sould do very well.
Reflex - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
*laff* Something tells me thats not the case.My curiosity is just that since these are obviously relabels, I am wondering who the original manufacturer is as the hardware is excellent and it might be nice to be able to acquire these for white box systems.
morespace - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Egad. You're absolutely correct. I didn't notice the daughterboard arrangement in that picture at first. It looks flat. But looking more closely at the placement of chips and capacitors on those motherboards, it's more than a family resemblance - they appear identical!I sense a conspiracy.
The hard drive enclosures appear different for what it's worth. Who makes these really? Apple?
Reflex - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
I take that back, that is the same as the one I have on my bench, however their cabling is a bit more messy.Look closely. Anandtech did not show a straight out picture from the same angle, but thats the same motherboard in more or less the same chassis with a few modifications. The CPU, chipset, Adaptec chip, PCI and AGP slots are all in the same places on that board, both use the daughtercard method for the CPU, etc.
Thats why I am asking who actually makes that board and case, someone is preconfiguring the servers and Sun/IBM are labelling and reselling them.
Reflex - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
That is not the same Intellistation that I have on my lab bench. I'll look up the model number when I go back in, but seeing as its friday night that won't be till monday.morespace - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Reflex, what are you on about? Here's a picture of the insides of an IBM Intellistation A Pro:http://www.digitalcad.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp...
Tell me, how does this look like a w2100z?
Nsofang - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Zealots on both sides always mess up any discussion. This is a review about the Sun WORKSTATION, yet punks bring in supercomputer arguments. WTF!! is wrong with you guys! If anything bring in arguments/discussions about comparable hardware G5's/Itaniums/NEC/SGI, something that adds to the discussion, not subtract.slashbinslashbash - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link
#33: You're right, for "general purpose computing" FLOPS is a pretty bad measure, but you've just changed your argument. For "high-end workstations" (what this argument is supposedly about) FLOPS can be *very* relevant, depending on the application.#34: I meant "nothing special" in terms of how supercomputing clusters are normally hooked up. Just a few years ago, Gigabit Ethernet cards cost $200, and their most prominent application was in supercomputing clusters.
Reflex - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link
#37: Yeah, I know, I was in a mood yesterday or I wouldn't have let him get me into it. ;)And you just made the point I was trying to make. While price can be an issue in the corporate space, its only the deciding factor when all other factors are equal. I was not even trying to get into a Mac vs. PC debate, this really has nothing to do with Mac's.
I do want to know who is building these workstations though, because its not Sun despite the label.
bob661 - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link
Reflex,He's trying to pull you off the subject. Supercomputers are irrelevant in this discussion. The thread is about workstations. Sun markets workstations. Apple does not. I know our company doesn't care about a couple hundred or even a couple thousand dollar difference if the service is impeccable and the workstation performs the task without headaches.