IBM POWER9 capabilities you will NOT find in any other computing platforms

Many of you have heard IBM POWER9 as one of the best RAS platforms in the world, great performance (~2x to >~3 times performance gains depending on the type of applications) and industry’s biggest memory bandwidth in its category. In this article, I want to write about other key features that goes under the cover and defines IBM POWER platform as one of the most unique and best computing platforms in the industry. Here’s quick read of three such technology differentiators:

1. World’s Multi OS platform

Most of the POWER9 server models run AIX, IBMi and various Linux flavors (namely: Red Hat, SuSE and Canonical) in one physical server. Which means you can slice a virtualized single physical system and carve out VMs that can run any of the above operating systems. No other infrastructure platform in the planet can run this many Operating systems (OS) in a single physical server. Customers who are running traditional AIX and IBMi core workloads can easily carve out a VM and perform proof of technologies, for example Private cloud deployment trial with IBM PowerVC or agile application development with containerization and OpenShift on POWER. The same secure and reliable IBM POWER can be easily extended to run multiple modern workloads.

2. Parallel execution with SMT

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a processor technology that allows multiple instruction streams (threads) to run concurrently on the same physical processor, improving overall throughput. If you’re familiar with the Intel world, it’s somewhat similar to Hyper-Threading Technology or HT Technology but does more than that! In the POWER world, the operating system looks at each hardware thread as an independent logical processor. Because there are multiple hardware threads per physical processor core, more instructions can run at the same time. Most of the POWER9 server models support single thread (SMT1), two (SMT2), four (SMT4) and eight threads (SMT8) respectively. Not only that, these SMT modes can be changed dynamically while the system is running. This can also be set for each Virtual Machines (VMs) or Logical Partitions (LPARs) independently. By setting the right SMT mode according to application type will give extra boost to the application performance.  For e.g. Java applications typically love SMT8 setting.

3. “Hyper sharing”

I call this “hyper sharing” but essentially there are 2 technologies that ensure efficient utilization of the processor (CPU) resources which is the most expensive resource in a computing platform. They are micro-partitioning and shared processor pools. When you enable the Micro-Partitioning technology, you can configure multiple partitions to share system processing units (CPUs) and it enables distribution of processors among one or more VMs. On POWER9 processors, a VM can be defined with a processor capacity as small as 0.05 processing units. All processors that are not dedicated to any VMs are placed in the shared processor pool that is managed by the system hypervisor. VMs that are set to use shared processors can use the shared processor pool. The hypervisor can automatically and continually adjust the amount of processing capacity allocated to each logical partition (with shared processors) based on system demand. You can set a shared processor partition so that, if the partition requires more processing capacity than its assigned number of processing units, the partition can use unused processing units from the shared processor pool.

If you’re already a POWER systems user, it is a good time to check if you are already making use of these technologies to improve your system utilization. These features require configuration and set-up for best use. If you’re new to IBM POWER, you can get in touch with me to see a demonstration.