Assessing Cavium's ThunderX2: The Arm Server Dream Realized At Last
by Johan De Gelas on May 23, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Enterprise
- SoCs
- Enterprise CPUs
- ARMv8
- Cavium
- ThunderX
- ThunderX2
Apache Spark 2.x Benchmarking
Last, but not least, we have Apache Spark. Apache Spark is the poster child of Big Data processing. Speeding up Big Data applications is the top priority project at the university lab I work for (Sizing Servers Lab of the University College of West-Flanders), so we produced a benchmark that uses many of the Spark features and is based upon real world usage.
The test is described in the graph above. We first start with 300 GB of compressed data gathered from the CommonCrawl. These compressed files are a large amount of web archives. We decompress the data on the fly to avoid a long wait that is mostly storage related. We then extract the meaningful text data out of the archives by using the Java library "BoilerPipe". Using the Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit, we extract entities ("words that mean something") out of the text, and then count which URLs have the highest occurrence of these entities. The Alternating Least Square algorithm is then used to recommend which URLs are the most interesting for a certain subject.
To get better scaling, we run with 4 executors. Researcher Esli Heyvaert reconfigured the Spark benchmark so it could run on Apache Spark 2.1.1.
Here are the results:
(*) EPYC and Xeon E5 V4 are older results, run on Kernel 4.8 and a slightly older Java 1.8.0_131 instead of 1.8.0_161. Though we expect that the results would be very similar on kernel 4.13 and Java 1.8.0_161, as we did not see much difference on the Skylake Xeon between those two setups.
Data processing is very parallel and extremely CPU intensive, but the shuffle phases require a lot of memory interactions. The time spent on storage I/O is negligible. The ALS phase does not scale well over many threads, but is less than 4% of the total testing time.
The ThunderX2 delivers 87% of the performance of the twice as expensive EPYC 7601. Since this benchmark scales well with the number of cores, we can estimate that the Xeon 6148 will score around 4.8. So while the ThunderX2 can not really threaten the Xeon Platinum 8176, it gives the Gold 6148 and its ilk a run for their money.
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Davenreturns - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
In the spec table for the AMD EPYC 7601 you have max sockets 4 and PCIe 3.0 lanes as 64. I thought the max sockets was 2 and that the total number of PCIe 3.0 lanes was 128 (64 in a dual socket machine).davegraham - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
max sockets is 2 and PCIe lanes is 128 (64 from each 7601 for a combined total of 128; remember, each 7601 has 128 PCIe lanes by themselves. 64 from each are ganged together for IF in a 2P system).davegraham - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
*are not *isDavenreturns - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
But in a single socket motherboard system, the total PCIe lanes available from one EPYC processor is 128 which I think we are both saying is correct.Davenreturns - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
The reason I think these two corrections are important and should be addressed by the author is the way the players in the market are competing. The table should read 128 PCIe lanes and 2 sockets max for EPYC. One only needs to look at AMD's EPYC One socket page to understand why it is important.https://www.amd.com/en/products/epyc-7000-series-1...
The page is filled with marketing trying to convince customers that you are actually getting a two socket server in just one socket. And yes 128 PCIe lanes are available to the customer in these one socket products as part of the reasoning.
The max number of sockets is also important. AMD and probably Cavium are both arguing that 90% of the market only needs 1 or 2 sockets. Intel doesn't agree and provides 4 or more socket configurations.
The one socket argument centers around the I/O and memory channels available in the AMD processor. Even though the table just might have typos, reviewers around the web had a hard time believing that a single chip offered 128 lanes of PCIe connectivity and I found a lot of misinformation. It continues today.
DanNeely - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
AFAIK even for intel 1/2 socket machines are around 90% of their sales. They're just selling enough total server chips in total that catering to the sliver of the market that does want 4/8way configurations is still worth their time.Arnulf - Sunday, May 27, 2018 - link
Profit margins in that market segment are likely to be way higher so it's worth it for Intel as long as there is no competition, forcing prices downwards.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
You are correct. Thanks for pointing that out.Davenreturns - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Thanks so much, Ryan.vanilla_gorilla - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
"This is because the customers who have invested in expensive enterprise software (Oracle, SAP) are less sensitive to cost on the hardware side, so they are much less likely to change to a new hardware platform."I don't really follow the logic here. Just because you spend a lot more money on software doesn't mean you wouldn't try to save money on hardware. You don't only focus on one related expense because it's larger.