Template:Application Tuning on the Coolthreads Platform

Application tuning
Leveraging the massive amount of thread-level parallelism (TLP) available on the CoolThreads platform can require different application development techniques than for traditional server platforms. Using TLP in applications is key to getting good performance. Sun has published a number of Sun BluePrints to assist application programmers in developing and deploying software on T1 or T2-based CoolThreads servers. The main article, Tuning Applications on UltraSPARC T1 Chip Multithreading Systems, addresses issues for general application programmers. There is also a BluePrints article on using the Cryptographic Accelerator Units on the T1 and T2 processors.

Case studies
A wide range of applications were optimized on the CoolThreads platform, including Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam, Oracle's Siebel applications, and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server. Sun also documented its experience in moving its own online store onto a T2000 server cluster, and have published two articles on web consolidation on CoolThreads using Solaris Containers.

Sun had an application performance tuning page for a range of open source applications, including MySQL, PHP, gzip, and ImageMagick. Proper optimization for CoolThreads systems can result in significant gains: when the Sun Studio compiler is used with the recommended optimization settings, MySQL performance improves by 268% compared to using just the -O3 flag.