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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.

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  1. Otavio P.February 17, 2025 at 1:46 AM

    It was really cool to learn that they also try and test the project I contribute to (Apache Camel) on their blackbird. Although I don't have a blackbird to call my own and have to use donated hardware, I still send occasional improvements to ppc64le (and s390x, BTW). I wish more folks would share how they build, test and run their projects on hardware like that ... it's always insightful and entertaining.

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  2. AnonymousMarch 3, 2025 at 5:54 AM

    How buy in Europe?

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    Replies
    1. AnonymousMarch 27, 2025 at 5:20 AM

      The Vikings shop in Germany had them in their shop for some time but they no longer have it. You can ask if they plan to distribute them again: shop.vikings.net/

      Delete
  3. AnonymousMarch 26, 2025 at 11:44 AM

    As ARM looks more towards monetising market share; as RISC-V demonstrates recoding the MIPS instruction set doesn't immediately lead to performance; as open source demonstrates all one needs is Linux and two good compilers to switch from the x86 architecture...

    ...now is a unique opportunity for developer-friendly performant Power based systems.

    Where are they?

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    Replies
    1. AnonymousMarch 27, 2025 at 5:06 AM

      They are there for years in the Raptor store https://www.raptorcs.com but they cost a ridiculous amount of money. And even if you want to pay thousands of dollars: for weeks/months the desired CPU is not available, then once it is in stock the heatsink is not avialble, next time the mainboard is backordered and takes month to become available ... You cannot attract customers this way. Which is disappointing because when they were launched they had good prices and performance but now (many years later) they fell behind in performance, are loud and cost ca. the double price that they costed 5 years ago. Not convincing to buy these anymore. That's why many pepole stay on AMD64 for performance or go to ARM64, Raspi etc. for low end and chepa price. Or they even buy the next vendor lock-in aka Apple which is still cheaper than Blackbirds and Taloses.

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