An Assessment of Leadership Performance With POWER6 Processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1

Overview

Compute-intensive performance is increasingly required for today's high-performance environments. The IBM System p 570 with POWER6 processors provides leadership performance and demonstrates excellent scalability moving from one node to four nodes in this environment while providing linear SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) scaling and growth for workloads similar to the metrics used here. This paper highlights the exceptional performance on IBM's POWER6 processor-based systems running with the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 operating system, based on recently audited published SPEC CPU2006 and SPECjbb2005 results, including single-system LINPACK metrics on System p 570 4-core, 8-core and 16-core systems. With Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) support turned on, Linux is easily able to provide effective scheduling support of the 32 processor threads seen on the 16-core 570 system.