Hi all,
I work for an Open Source consultancy and EnterpriseDB partner in London and have at my disposal for a few months an
IBMPower 730 PowerLinux box. My task is to showcase the potential benefits of running Linux on a platform other than
x86and IBM are currently having a big push on their Power architecture boxes for running big data applications on
Linux.However there are potentially other applications such as databases which are not currently receiving focus.
Being aware that boxes such as this are exceedingly rare and expensive to come by I feel there is an opportunity for
thewider community to be involved in what happens with this box. I read with interest an article by Robert Haas
(http://rhaas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/did-i-say-32-cores-how-about-64.html)detailing the performance capabilities of
PostgreSQLon 64 cores of x86 and the improvements that kernels newer than 3.2 bring. It would be great to produce some
comparablefigures on Power but also some meaningful benchmarks to demonstrate (or at least attempt to demonstrate) the
propositionof PostgreSQL on Power.
The box at my disposal has 64 cores (Power7, 3.6GHz) and 512Gb RAM. Disk is currently configured as 6 x 900Gb SAS
drivesin a RAID 5 configuration.
So - please let me have your thoughts. If anyone knows of someone who would be interested in this please pass this
messageon (or let me know where to post it onto - my job is to be an advocate for EnterpriseDB so this seemed like a
goodmailing list to start with but I am aware there are many others). Any suggestions of what to benchmark - and I'm
lookingespecially for something that will provide a meaningful comparison against other databases (e.g. Oracle) where
possible.But equally if anyone needs anything testing on a Power architecture service with lots of cores and RAM send
methe details and I'll do all I can to help the community.
Thanks!
James
