In the September Monthly meeting we had two presentations. Dharminder Rattu, an Associate from Karlsruhe reviewed performance of both synthetic and applications benchmarks in a virtualized environment. Multiple virtualization solutions had been used for testing and the tests had been carried out with the help of an openlab summer student and in collaboration with the ALICE experiment.The synthetic benchmarks showed that it is costly to invoke supervisory functions, such as memory allocations or network i/o, in an intensive manner when running virtualized.

In a second presentation, Sverre Jarp, reviewed recent processors from AMD, Intel, and Sun, especially in the light of evolving multi- and many-cores. He concluded that we will continue to see "fat" cores in reasonable numbers (4 - 8), but that, increasingly, we will see transistors deployed to create large numbers of cores and threads. Specialized functional units are also on the horizon. The speaker also reviewed some recommendations for more agile software in such an environment.
Both presentations are available on the openlab Web site.

S. Jarp
CERN openlab CTO