Real-world Blackbird does real-world stuff for Apache (really)

Let's call it a #ShowUsYourTalos moment. This video from Savoir Technologies shows off their own Blackbird system, carrying an 8-core POWER9 CPU with a 3U HSF, a 4-slot NVMe riser card, two 64GB DDR4 DIMMs and a 500W PSU running on the onboard ASPEED framebuffer.

But this machine isn't just a bragging rights toy: it provides substantial support for the Apache products Savoir works on. These are primarily Java-based and there are three main choices for JDKs on POWER9, in particular Adoptium's Temurin, Eclipse OpenJ9 (descended from IBM's original J9, which I personally run on my AIX POWER6), and Red Hat's build of OpenJDK. Savoir tests on all three.

As anyone working on Java will attest, it's not enough just to make sure it works on different JVMs. This machine is dedicated to improving ppc64le support, stability and performance actually on the architecture itself. (Linus would agree.) Savoir does multiple builds to tamp down broken unit tests and find glitches due to Power ISA's different memory model guarantees. One example they cite in the video was a stress test they did on this very box, running one billion SOAP requests through Apache CXF with no errors.

I'm not involved or linked to Savoir in any way; I'm just delighted to see real hardware in the real world doing real things for real people. Right now, I don't think you're going to get throughput like this from anything with the current crop of RISC-V chips in it, and I'm hopeful that S1 is still in the pipeline to give us the shot in the arm we need to stay ahead of the curve on open hardware.