( ESNUG 375 Item 11 ) ------------------------------------------- [06/28/01]
Subject: Linux Is Lousy For Servers & Get2chip's Linux vs. Sun Benchmarks
> We're a small company using & abusing a couple of HSPICE licenses on a
> few Sun Solaris platforms which are showing their age.
>
> We'd like to figure out the most cost-effective way of upgrading our
> HSPICE capabilities, both for the projects where we do in-house HSPICE
> simulations and where HSPICE is used "under the covers" (cell
> characterization software, for instance).
>
> I've heard lots of anecdotes about how a cheap x86 cluster (with "modern"
> processors) can provide more bang-for-the-buck than the corresponding Sun
> Solaris workstation setup. This is especially because of the
> less-expensive HSPICE licenses for x86 boxen & OSes, and for our situation
> where we are only doing HSPICE simulation of small cell-level transistor
> netlists (instead of large blocks) so we don't need massive memory and/or
> memory bandwidth.
>
> I was hoping that either you or one of your readers can point me to some
> specs/benchmark results/examples that I could show to some of my coworkers
> for our discussions.
>
> - Kim Flowers (Mr.)
> Translogic Technology, Inc.
From: Adel Khouja <adel@get2chip.com>
Hi John,
I follow with interest the recent Sun/HP/Linux thread on ESNUG. From the
beginning, we (Get2Chip) decided to use Linux for 100% of our development.
Market realities forced us to port all of our releases to Sun/Solaris, and
we expect that our next release will also be ported to HPUX.
Here are the details of our Solaris vs. Linux experience.
Get2Chip Volare Synthesis
------------------+--------------------
Sun | Linux
------------------+--------------------
design1 (120K gate-eq) 100 min | 45 min
design2 (250K gate-eq) 210 min | 100 min
What we used:
SUN
SUNW, Ultra-60;sparc; sun4u
Physical Memory(RAM): 2048 Megabytes
Virtual Memory(Swap): 2049 Megabytes
Operating System: SunOS Release 5.7 Generic_106541-11
OS Release is Solaris 7 8/99 s998s_u3wos_11 SPARC
System is a Sun Ultra 60 UPA/PCI (2 X UltraSPARC-II 450MHz) 2.0 GB RAM
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.7 Generic October 1998
LINUX
OS Release is Red Hat Linux release 6.2 (Zoot)
System is a AuthenticAMD 1000 Mhz AMD Athlon(tm) Processor 960 MB RAM
more /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 2
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1000.069690
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
sep_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr 6 mce cx8 sep mtrr pge 14 cmov
fcmov 17 22 mmx 24 30 3dnow
bogomips : 996.15
more /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 2124222464 411144192 1713078272 16814080 45359104 97726464
Swap: 838934528 25690112 813244416
MemTotal: 2074436 kB
MemFree: 1672928 kB
MemShared: 16420 kB
Buffers: 44296 kB
Cached: 95436 kB
BigTotal: 1114044 kB
BigFree: 873324 kB
SwapTotal: 819272 kB
SwapFree: 794184 kB
I concur with one of your readers who said they had good experiences with
Dell hardware. A Dell 2- or 4-way with 4 G of memory is a honking machine.
And even with Linux's current 2.8G memory limit, that's still big enough for
us to synthesize and optimize a 2M gate-equivalent design in 10-15 hours.
Pretty good for any class machine.
Using Linux as a file server is another story...
At the time when we were running Linux as our main file server, we basically
had one choice for a file systems, type ext2. Although ext2 is fairly fast,
it did not have a journaling system nor quality file system tools. If we
had to reset the machine, the system would take a painfully long time to
check the entire file system.
Secondly, with Linux, we ran into many headaches with driver and network
support. Linux has a reputation for supporting cheaper hardware well and
more exotic high end equipment, poorly. With devices like a fast Mylex
RAID card, we had difficulties getting initial drivers and then finding
updates to known problems. As well, not all drivers were developed equally
as was the case for 3COM network cards (one of the biggest culprits).
To sum it up, we had a combination of hardware driver problems and
Linux/file system problems, the worse possible situation. It should
be noted that we NEVER lost any data during our ordeal.
The Linux file server specs:
2x 550Mhz PIII
512M RAM
2x Intel Pro100b+
Mylex Extreme RAID 2000 with 128M RAM
Seagate 10K Cheetah Drives
We have since migrated off our main Linux file-server to a Network
Appliance 760. This unit has been rock solid and has returned on our
investment several times over by offering superior performance (raw
throughput), greater reliability, and unsurpassed technical support.
Suffice to say that we're very happy with Linux and plan to continue our
development/porting strategy. Lintel boxes give us 200+% runtime
improvements over Sun/HP. Yes, Lintel boxes are sometimes less stable,
but we've found that is usually due to flakey h/w rather than sw/OS issues.
When we've had problems with Linux, it's generally been because of H/W.
- Adel Khouja, R&D
get2chip.com
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ Better Late Than Never ]
Hi John,
You're publishing too quickly; I didn't get a chance to respond before
the next ESNUG came out.
We have about 70 linux systems in a server farm. They're all running
Debian 2.2. The original machines were do-it-yourself PIII 500 MHz.
The latest are PIII 1+GHZ machines from ARM. They all have IDE drives
and network cards compatible with the tulip driver. We were using a
disk image to install, but now we're using VA Linux's systemImager. To
upgrade the farm, we upgrade one machine (apt-get update; apt-get -f
dist-upgrade), test it with all our software, and then copy the image
to all the other machines over the network and reboot. They're all
single processor which fits well with the one job / one machine queueing
software we're using.
Our main simulator is VCS. We also use VirSim, SureLint, and SureCov.
The system guys are heavy users of matlab on these machines. 256MB is
plenty of memory for most of the designs we've run with these tools,
but maybe it's not enough memory as you move closer to the backend.
We just started trying dc_shell and PrimeTime on linux. I'll try any of
our tools on linux when they're available.
Please keep me anonymous.
- [ Better Late Than Never ]
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