DoD: 5-10 Year SPARC Processor Contract Award

[SPARC M8 Processor, Courtesy Oracle Corporation]

DoD: 5-10 Year SPARC Processor Contract Award

Abstract: 

The SPARC family of processors had been produced by manufacturers, both foreign and domestic, for decades. Sun Microsystems created the first SPARC specification, with dozens of manufacturers creating their own implementations. Vendors such as Fujitsu and Oracle continue to produce SPARC processors, today. Vendors have been providing On-Premise to Off-Premise compute power in recent years. The Department of Defense had awarded another contract, SPARC support for 5-10 years to ViON, who provides both on and off premise SPARC compute resources.

 

 

[SPARC Logo, courtesy SPARC International]

SPARC Introduction:

The SPARC Processor was created to out scale older processor chips in the 1980's, becoming one of the most successful 32 bit commercial RISC processors. The first 64 bit SPARC processors were released in 1993, a decade before Intel processor clone manufacture AMD created an x86 64 bit processor using AMD64 in 2003, with Sun porting Solaris. Intel followed a year later with Intel64 in 2004, a full decade after Sun had released 64 Bit SPARC. SPARC continued to be the fastest single thread, largest memory footprint, or largest scalable SMP multiple threaded workhorse in the industry, for decades to come... with CPU chips supplied from various vendors.

 

[Oracle SPARC M8 Processor Addition in 2017, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Today's SPARC:

SPARC continues to be the fastest single thread, single core, single, socket, and SMP multiple socket performer, on the market today... with many additional features such as database accelerators, cryptographic accelerators, and decompression accelerators. The need for the fastest processing continues to be needed by high end customers, such as government, defense, and large enterprises.

[Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC M12 Chassis, courtesy Fujitsu]

Fujitsu's M12 Processor

Fujitsu's latest April 2017 implementation of SPARC is the M12 processor, with 12 cores per socket, 8 threads [vCPU] per core, more co-processors, and ability to expand to 32 sockets in a pair of racks. This allows for massive compute & memory capacity on a scale unachievable in in other architecture platforms. Platforms such as this is optimal for massive Government and Multi-Nation Enterprises.

 

[Oracle SPARC M8 Block Diagram, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Oracle M8 Processor

Oracle's latest August 2017 implementation of SPARC is the M8 processor, with 32 compute cores, 8 threads [vCPU] per core, more co-processors, phenomenal performance outrunning all non-SPARC processors [as has been consistent, for years.] Oracle implemented 8 Sockets per chassis, to meet their own Enterprise based Engineered System requirements.

 

[SPARC Physical and Logical Virtualization, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

SPARC Virtualization:

Before other mainstream vendors had built some degree of virtualization, a mature 64 bit SPARC platform offered many options of virtualization, adding various layers over time:

• Physical Domains (1993 by the Cray Superserver 6400)
• Zones [Containers] (2004 by Sun Microsystems on Solaris 10 Beta Build 51)
• Logical Domains (2007 by Sun Microsystems on their SPARC T1 processors)

Vendors like ViON can technically provide compute resources via any one of these technologies, including bare-metal physical.

Conclusions:

SPARC and the Solaris Operating System, which provides amazing flexibility to larger installations. It appears that this latest government contract will last well into the next SPARC release, projected by both Oracle & Fujitsu - where both vendors expect the next SPARC release to be 2020.