PostgreSQL on Power Linux

Hi all,

I work for an Open Source consultancy and EnterpriseDB partner in London and have at my disposal for a few months an IBM Power 730 PowerLinux box. My task is to showcase the potential benefits of running Linux on a platform other than x86 and IBM are currently having a big push on their Power architecture boxes for running big data applications on Linux. However there are potentially other applications such as databases which are not currently receiving focus.

Being aware that boxes such as this are exceedingly rare and expensive to come by I feel there is an opportunity for the wider community to be involved in what happens with this box. I read with interest an article by Robert Haas (http://rhaas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/did-i-say-32-cores-how-about-64.html) detailing the performance capabilities of PostgreSQL on 64 cores of x86 and the improvements that kernels newer than 3.2 bring. It would be great to produce some comparable figures on Power but also some meaningful benchmarks to demonstrate (or at least attempt to demonstrate) the proposition of PostgreSQL on Power.

The box at my disposal has 64 cores (Power7, 3.6GHz) and 512Gb RAM. Disk is currently configured as 6 x 900Gb SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

So - please let me have your thoughts. If anyone knows of someone who would be interested in this please pass this message on (or let me know where to post it onto - my job is to be an advocate for EnterpriseDB so this seemed like a good mailing list to start with but I am aware there are many others). Any suggestions of what to benchmark - and I'm looking especially for something that will provide a meaningful comparison against other databases (e.g. Oracle) where possible. But equally if anyone needs anything testing on a Power architecture service with lots of cores and RAM send me the details and I'll do all I can to help the community.

Thanks!

James