Thread: PostgreSQL on Power Linux
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
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM, James Freeman <james@quru.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I work for an Open Source consultancy and EnterpriseDB partner in London and have at my disposal for a few months an IBM Power 730 PowerLinux box. My task is to showcase the potential benefits of running Linux on a platform other than x86 and 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.
I hate to be a downer but I used to run PostgreSQL on Power running RHEL. It was _very_ snappy. I'm told that the performance was way better than anything else that could be purchased at the time. The boxes were expensive (up front and ongoing cost) and the different endian-ness made it impossible to take a snapshot of production and remount it on any non-power machine. We were also afraid of being the only people that ran PostgreSQL on RHEL on Power which didn't help matters.
Some of my problems would have gone away if there was more power adoption and some could have been mitigated with tools that no one had time to write/find. I'm not sure what to do about the price tag complains though:)
Nik
Hi Nik,
I don't disagree with your points on price of the Power platform or lack of wider adoption - however it's really kind of chicken and egg - we're only going to get wider adoption if everything falls into line. Opinion is sure to differ on what it would require but for me I would suspect you would need increased visibility that says "Postgres on Power can beat technology x hands down" - that's my bit as I don't think the wider world is aware of Power.
Regarding price and adoption - this is definitely the other big issue. I can't predict how this will go but the OpenPOWER consortium may go some way to lower pricing and wider adoption - I believe they have motherboard make Tyan engaged and whilst there is no physical product to show for it yet perhaps this could lead to white box Power solutions which would drive the cost down and hence adoption up. It would also pave the way (potentially) for competitors to IBM in the hardware space so buyers would no longer be single-sourced for their servers.
Of course it may or may not come to that - but let's get the message out there of what's possible and then see where it goes.
James
On 26 Sep 2013, at 17:16, Nikolas Everett <nik9000@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM, James Freeman <james@quru.com> wrote:Hi all,
I work for an Open Source consultancy and EnterpriseDB partner in London and have at my disposal for a few months an IBM Power 730 PowerLinux box. My task is to showcase the potential benefits of running Linux on a platform other than x86 and 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.I hate to be a downer but I used to run PostgreSQL on Power running RHEL. It was _very_ snappy. I'm told that the performance was way better than anything else that could be purchased at the time. The boxes were expensive (up front and ongoing cost) and the different endian-ness made it impossible to take a snapshot of production and remount it on any non-power machine. We were also afraid of being the only people that ran PostgreSQL on RHEL on Power which didn't help matters.Some of my problems would have gone away if there was more power adoption and some could have been mitigated with tools that no one had time to write/find. I'm not sure what to do about the price tag complains though:)Nik
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:25 PM, James Freeman <james@quru.com> wrote:
Hi Nik,I don't disagree with your points on price of the Power platform or lack of wider adoption - however it's really kind of chicken and egg - we're only going to get wider adoption if everything falls into line. Opinion is sure to differ on what it would require but for me I would suspect you would need increased visibility that says "Postgres on Power can beat technology x hands down" - that's my bit as I don't think the wider world is aware of Power.
Well, five years ago Power on Linux beat x86 hands down for us. It became a problem later but only due to lack of wider adoption and price/interoperability.
Regarding price and adoption - this is definitely the other big issue. I can't predict how this will go but the OpenPOWER consortium may go some way to lower pricing and wider adoption - I believe they have motherboard make Tyan engaged and whilst there is no physical product to show for it yet perhaps this could lead to white box Power solutions which would drive the cost down and hence adoption up. It would also pave the way (potentially) for competitors to IBM in the hardware space so buyers would no longer be single-sourced for their servers.
Cool!
Nik
James, > The box at my disposal has 64 cores (Power7, 3.6GHz) and 512Gb RAM. > Disk is currently configured as 6 x 900Gb SAS drives in a RAID 5 > configuration. You'll want to reconfigure the IO before doing any benchmarks, or you'll be just measuring the speed of the RAID5. > So - please let me have your thoughts. If anyone knows of someone who > would be interested in this please pass this message on (or let me > know where to post it onto - my job is to be an advocate for > EnterpriseDB so this seemed like a good mailing list to start with > but I am aware there are many others). Any suggestions of what to > benchmark - and I'm looking especially 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 me the > details and I'll do all I can to help the community. So, the main problem is that we don't really have benchmarks which can max out that kind of hardware. DBT2 will hit limits on how fast the program can run before the database is saturated, and setting up the kit for Spec would be a very involved project. We could do something with having multiple pgbench clients hitting the DB at once, but that wouldn't be comparable to anything else in the world. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com
--On 26. September 2013 12:16:45 -0400 Nikolas Everett <nik9000@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I hate to be a downer but I used to run PostgreSQL on Power running
> RHEL. It was _very_ snappy. I'm told that the performance was way
> better than anything else that could be purchased at the time. The
> boxes were expensive (up front and ongoing cost) and the different
> endian-ness made it impossible to take a snapshot of production and
> remount it on any non-power machine. We were also afraid of being the
> only people that ran PostgreSQL on RHEL on Power which didn't help
> matters.
>
>
> Some of my problems would have gone away if there was more power adoption
> and some could have been mitigated with tools that no one had time to
> write/find. I'm not sure what to do about the price tag complains
> though:)
We have a customer running PostgreSQL for years now since POWER5 and
PostgreSQL 8.2. There were problems in the beginning but they were mostly
related to storage. They used SLES10 at the beginning, which ran well, but
whoever tries to maintain such a system will have an idea how hard SuSE can
be...
They run now on POWER7 with RHEL6 for a year now without any bigger
problems (complete redesign of the setup and storage with IBM SVC). The
instances itself perform very well and i have to say that this setup is
very very mission critical for their setup. The whole strength of this
platform are the powerful virtualization capabilities and its performance
there, i think.
But i have to admit, you need some very experienced people to get the whole
stuff running.
--
Thanks
Bernd