The Glamor in Mass Transit (?)

Given a choice, few consumers would pick a double decker bus over an Italian sports car. But if you were in the business of moving people at maximum efficiency, buses are hard to beat. Their mileage per passenger mile is >20x your average sports car. One way they achieve this, in the language of IT, is that buses parallelize transportation. They optimize for multi passenger performance, versus single passenger performance (largely the opposite of what most consumers do, parents in minivans notwithstanding). That same focus on industrial efficiency (and divergence from consumer preference) has been washing over the datacenter for a few years. While consumers turn to Dolce and Gabbana phones, datacenters are increasingly pining for high performance buses - infrastructure optimized for utilization, efficiency, and overall performance, not just simple component speed. That's a focus we initiated years ago - when we dove into chip multi-threading, shipping the industry's first octal (8) core microprocessor - each core with 4 threads of execution, making for a sub-$4,000 server capable of doing 32 threads of work simultaneously (with great mileage). (Click here to try one free.) We deliberately prioritized efficiency over single thread performance - and it was a good bet. Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun are now all investing heavily in multi-core platforms - with Sun farthest ahead, having taped out the world's only mainstream hexa-deca (16) c...

Date: February, 24 2007
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/brutal_efficiency_virtualization_by_another

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