topic Re: Question on HP Threading in Operating System - HP-UX

Question on HP Threading

Trojan36 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:55:07 GMT

Are there any whitepapers and information on how HP PA Risc and Itanium threads on a single core or dual core processor? I am is trying to determine whether there is single threading on these processors or multi-threading. If there are any whitepapers comparing it to Sun's threading would be good to. Thx in advance.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Hakki Aydin Ucar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:43:01 GMT

Hi,

The following link is for PA-RISC and ITANIUM
http://www.openpa.net/systems/
http://www.openpa.net/systems/#itanium

If you mean Multithread programming like using Java, I believe PA-RISC supports it.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Trojan36 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:33:56 GMT

Not sure how the two links has to do with explaining threading on HP-UX??

Re: Question on HP Threading

Emil Velez — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:47:29 GMT

you are referring to Hyperthreading.. Not thread programming.

HPUX supports it

Re: Question on HP Threading

rick jones — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:19:40 GMT

What sort of threading do you mean? It sounds like you wish to ask if the processors have hardware threading support. In that case, PA-RISC has no hardware threading support. Itanium since the "Montectio" (Itanium 9000 series) processors has support for it, with each core supporting two threads. If you want to know how much it may improve performance, that is an "it depends" to the extent the best thing is to try it with your workload and see.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Michael Steele_2 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:24:11 GMT

HI

I think your phrasiology is throwing a couple, and I suppose you're looking for benchmarks. Try this thread if its not what you want let us know:

http://www.spec.org/web2009/results/

Re: Question on HP Threading

rick jones — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:38:11 GMT

Michael - there are no PA-RISC nor Itanium SPECweb2009 results published. To date, all SPECweb2009 results published on www.spec.org have used Xeon processors in one variation or another.

I can say with five-nines certainly there will be no PA-RISC SPECweb2009 benchmarks published at this point. The most recent PA-RISC, SPEC web server benchmarks published would be SPECweb99 or perhaps SPECweb99_SSL. And, since PA-RISC never had hardware threading it is moot anyway :)

Whether or not there will be Itanium SPECweb2009 benchmarks published is anyone's guess.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Michael Steele_2 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:54:41 GMT

Rick

You know, you're absolutely right.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Hakki Aydin Ucar — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:31:45 GMT

> Trojan36: Not sure how the two links has to do with explaining threading on HP-UX??

Not threading but CPU specifications..

Re: Question on HP Threading

Trojan36 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:31:31 GMT

One follow-up question on the Itanium and two threads per Core. How exactly is the processing done on those threads and at what speed do those threads run at? For example, if the Core has a speed of 1.6 GHZ, is each thread running at Max 800 MHZ? Thx in advance.

Re: Question on HP Threading

Duncan Edmonstone — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:43:42 GMT

Your question shows you ceratinly haven't grasped what "hyperthreading" is acttuall about... as a starting point you should read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

Threads aren't seperate "cores", they are just ways of getting more out of the execution queues on a processor by taking advantage of thread stalls for memory access etc. to stick another thread into execution...

_Why_ are you asking these questions, you might get better answers if you gave some context...

HTH

Duncan