HP tested two 64-way Integrity Superdome servers using 1.5GHz Itanium processors and running HP-UX 11i and Oracle’s 10g clustered database. The two servers were clustered with InfiniBand switching equipment from Topspin Communications. The resulting server cluster was able to chew through 86,283 queries per hour at a cost of $161 per query per hour (QPH).
In January, a single Superdome box with 64 processors running the same software was able to do 49,105 QPH at a cost of $118 per QPH, which means the running of the cluster software and latencies between nodes ate about 12% of the aggregate computing power in the box. This is very good overhead for clusters, which can consume 20% to 30% of aggregate capacity.
The only other machines tested to date on the 10TB TPC-H test is a cluster of five pSeries 690s running AIX 5.2 and DB2 UDB 8.1, which dates from early 2003. That cluster could support 62,215 QPH using 1.3 GHz Power4 processors at a cost of $243 per QPH. IBM can probably meet or beat HP on the TPC-H test with two 64-way Power5 Squadron boxes. But we will have to wait and see if this happens.
