If the name of the game is faster, smaller and denser, the last few months had no shortage of record-setting in all three areas, across nearly all elements of IT infrastructure.

IBM claimed a new world record in processing speed and low latency, Juniper rolled out a line of ultra-low-energy routers and Tilera, a Silicon Valley startup, announced its intent to release a 100-core server processor.

IBM’s new benchmark was set with its BladeCenter HS22 server, powered by Intel’s Xeon 5500-series processor. The system ran Reuters Market Data System v6.3 and was able to process 1.3 million market-data updates per second, with latency lower than one millisecond.

Both Thomson Reuters and Intel worked together with IBM on achieving the record.

Configuration used in the test included IBM BladeCenter H chassis, which contained five HS22 blades. Each of the blades carried two quad-core Xeon X5570 2.93GHz processors, 24GB of memory, one 143GB drive, two integrated Broadcom 1GbE controllers and one Intel 10GbE XF SR dual-port adapter. The platform used Red Hat’s Linux Server 5.3.

Sun said in July 2008 that it had broken the barrier of one million messages per second with its Intel-based Fire X4150 servers running RMDS. The company said then that the throughput of 1.01 million messages per second was highest to date.

Intel and Sun were able to achieve submillisecond latency at 480,000 messages per second, and one millisecond at 500,000 messages per second.

STARTUP CLAIMS LEADERSHIP

The new record did not give Intel a chance to relax, as Tilera, a San Jose, California-based startup, announced that it was developing a 100-core server processor, which it claimed was not only a computing monster but also took much less power to operate than some of Intel’s most energy-efficient products.

The Gx100 is one of four processors Tilera unveiled in October, also announcing 16- , 36- and 64-core members of the new family.

The 100-core chip will take up to 55W at full performance, while the 16-core version will draw around 10W, according to Tilera director of marketing Bob Doud.

The least power-hungry chip in Intel’s Xeon 5500 family is the dual-core L5508, which at maximum performance draws 38W. The rest of the processors in the series take between 60W and 130W, with each chip on the lower end of that range carrying four cores.

One of Tilera’s investors, Taiwanese server manufacturer Quanta Computer, will also be the first vendor to put the processor on its product. First Tilera-powered Quanta servers will come on the market in 2010, Doud said, adding that other manufacturers were interested but did not wish to be mentioned publicly.

The company will roll out first samples of the 36-core processor in the fourth quarter of 2010; the 16-core version about two months later; and the 100-core chip will become available for sampling in the first quarter of 2011.

Quanta invested $10m in the startup’s third round of financing. Other investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Walden International and TSMC – a Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer that also makes Tilera chips.

The company raised a total of $39m in the first two rounds of financing and $25m in the third round.

NETWORKING SPEED

On the networking front, Juniper said its new line of routers running on the company’s new chipset used half as much power per gigabit than the competing products.

The company’s Junos Trio chipset is based on its 3D Scaling technology, which allows networks to scale dynamically to increase bandwidth, number of subscribers and services simultaneously.

“We invested more than $80m over the last five years to develop Junos Trio, yielding a fundamental advance in performance, flexibility and power efficiency to meet the internet’s massive three-dimensional scaling needs,” said Juniper founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu.

Juniper’s MX960 router (based on the new chipset) took 37W per 10GE, compared with competing products’ 75W and 90W per 10GE, the company said in a statement.

The processor includes four chips, totalling 1.5 billion transistors and 320 processes.

It is capable of handling total router throughput of up to 2.6 terabits per second and up to 2.3 million subscribers per rack.

Juniper said it plans to start shipping the MX 3D line cards and routers based on the new chipset in December 2009 and will launch more MX 3D products next year.

This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine