RunAbove: A POWER8 Compute Cloud With Offerings Up To 176 Threads

The test/benchmark setup experience was satisfactory. Many of the tests available through the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org will run just fine out-of-the-box on PowerPC. Some tests will run into issues over GCC PowerPC not supporting -march=native so you just need to then set your own CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Strangely when trying to set -mcpu=power8 on the stock Fedora compiler, programs failed to build okay, but that's likely due to GCC 4.9 having good Power8 support. It's unfortunate that the default compiler wasn't changed for RunAbove's cloud, etc, but with my remaining time in their cloud will work on trying out the latest GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers on their 2XL instance.

Anyhow, this morning I do have some preview benchmarks for the results that were completed so far in their Power8 cloud for both instance types. Visit 1410231-LI-RUNABOVE842 on OpenBenchmarking.org for all the results.

John The Ripper, Primesieve, and Smallpt are the best results to look at that worked fine on both instances, can scale very well to use all available CPU threads, and work great on PowerPC. Many common test cases will have a difficult time scaling to extremely high core counts and/or not be well optimized for PowerPC.

While it's always a challenge making a suitable performance comparison against a remote cloud, for some perspective as to the Power8 performance I ran the same benchmarks locally on a Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system with Fedora to just obtain some rough ball-park figures. You can find the i7-5960X vs. Power8 cloud results on OpenBenchmarking.org. For John The Ripper the 16-thread i7-5960X setup can beat the 2XL instance (except in MD5), Primesieve prime number generation is close between the i7-5960X and 2XL, and Smallpt wins with the 176-thread PowerPC instance.

With some OpenBenchmarking.org foo is some rough figures against Amazon's EC2 x86 cloud from some benchmark results ran last year. While there's notable software differences, you can see the auto-merged data on OpenBenchmarking.org. The 2XL instance is able to beat out Amazon's EC2 m3.xlarge instance type by many times, with Dolfyn that doesn't scale to many cores the higher-end x86 VMs can be faster than the 2XL, etc.

Well, that's the preview of the experience running in RunAbove's Power8 cloud. Overall it's very exciting to now have a large, public PowerPC cloud. I'll be running some more performance tests over the days ahead if any Phoronix readers have additional test requests to post in our forums or by letting me know on Twitter.