Apple XG5 User Manual
Xserve G5
Technology Overview
January 2004
Contents
Page 3 Introduction
Page 4 Product Overview
Key Features
Rack-Optimized Server Design
High-Density Cluster Node Configuration
Page 7 Performance Overview
Processor Performance
Networking Throughput
Page 11 PowerPC G5 Processor
Apple and IBM Partnership
64-Bit Computing Power
Next-Generation PowerPC Architecture
Page 13 High-Bandwidth Server Architecture
Gigahertz Frontside Bus
Point-to-Point System Controller
Advanced ECC Memory Technology
High-Performance PCI-X Expansion
Dual Onboard Gigabit Ethernet
Additional Connectivity
Page 17 Affordable, Scalable Storage
SATA Drive Technology
Software and Hardware RAID Options
Page 20 Integrated Hardware Monitoring
Page 22 Mac OS X Server Version 10.3
Optimized for the PowerPC G5
Built-in Network Services
Innovative Remote Management
Page 24 Service, Support, and Training Options
Page 26 Purchasing Information
Page 28 Technical Specifications
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
Introduction
In May 2002, Apple introduced Xserve, a high-density, 1U rackmount server that
was applauded for its value and versatility. In 2003, we built on that success with
performance enhancements, more storage, and flexible build-to-order options. Now
in its third generation, this highly acclaimed server gets a huge burst of power from
the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor—accelerating a wide range of intensive server
chores and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.
The groundbreaking PowerPC G5 made its debut in Apple’s Power Mac G5, enabling
computer users to tackle projects never before possible on a desktop system. In fact,
its performance was so remarkable that Virginia Tech chose the G5 processor as the
engine for its newest supercomputing facility, ranked third most powerful in the
world.
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With the introduction of Xserve G5, the same processing performance is
packed into a slim 1U form factor. Combine the superefficient PowerPC G5 with highbandwidth, server-optimized system I/O and fast internal storage, and Xserve G5
outperforms today’s fastest 1U Xeon- and Opteron-based systems.
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In addition to robust hardware features, Xserve G5 comes complete with an unlimitedclient license for Mac OS X Server software, a host of powerful network services, and
integrated remote management and monitoring tools. Easy to set up and easy
to maintain, Xserve G5 with Mac OS X Server dramatically reduces the complexity
of system administration and minimizes maintenance costs. For added peace of mind,
Apple offers enterprise-class service and support products for Xserve G5 hardware
and Mac OS X Server software, with a single vendor to call.
This uniquely Apple integration results in superior performance, unparalleled manageability, and increased uptime—enabling organizations to lower their total cost of
ownership and reduce the pressure on network administrators. Whether in small or
large business, higher education or K–12 schools, creative departments, or science and
technology research centers, the affordable Xserve G5 is the perfect server for today’s
new breed of UNIX-based solutions.
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
What’s New?
• Single or dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors
using 90-nanometer process technology
• Gigahertz frontside bus with independent
data paths in and out of the processor
• Two independent frontside buses on dual
processor systems
• Point-to-point system controller
• Support for up to 8GB of 400MHz
ECC memory
• Fast 133MHz PCI-X bus for Fibre Channel,
RAID, SCSI, or cluster interconnect cards
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces on the main
logic board
• Up to three 80GB or 250GB Serial ATA (SATA)
Apple Drive Modules
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Product Overview
Key Features
Xserve G5 combines 64-bit processors, a high-bandwidth system architecture, and
massive storage with Apple’s legendary ease of use. The following features make Xserve
a robust, versatile server solution for businesses and institutions everywhere.
Single or dual 2GHz processors. Each 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor features an
optimized Velocity Engine unit, two floating-point units, and robust branch prediction
logic. To get more work done faster, its superpipelined, superscalar architecture can
handle large numbers of complex operations in parallel.
Gigahertz frontside bus. The industry’s fastest frontside bus maximizes processor
performance by transferring instructions and data at rates of up to 8GB/s. In dual
processor systems, each PowerPC G5 has a dedicated frontside bus for a combined
throughput of up to 16GB/s.
Advanced ECC memory technology. A 128-bit memory controller speeds data in and
out of main memory at up to 6.4GB/s. Today’s Xserve G5 supports 8GB of fast, 400MHz
RAM with Error Correction Code (ECC) protection.
High-bandwidth I/O. Two open 64-bit PCI-X slots provide throughput of up to 1GB/s for
PCI devices. Dual onboard Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and FireWire 800 ports offer highperformance connectivity and deployment flexibility.
Flexible storage. Three drive bays hold up to 750GB of fast, internal Serial ATA (SATA)
storage
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in hot-plug Apple Drive Modules.4Fast PCI-X slots and optional cards allow
connection to external storage devices, including Apple’s Xserve RAID storage system.
Innovative hardware monitoring. Dedicated monitoring hardware integrates with
industry-leading software for remote monitoring of one or many Xserve G5 systems.
The software can even send automatic notifications via email or pager.
UNIX-based operating system. An unlimited-client license for Mac OS X Server,
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complete with easy-to-use open source workgroup and Internet services, is included at
no additional cost. Built on open standards, Mac OS X Server integrates seamlessly into
enterprise infrastructures. What’s more, Apple has written the latest version of Mac OS X
Server to maximize the computing power of the 64-bit PowerPC G5.
Server-class support products. To minimize downtime, Apple offers a suite of
enterprise-class support products, including onsite hardware repairs, advanced software
support, and convenient spares kits.
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
Xserve G5
Apple’s new Xserve packs high-density
PowerPC G5 computing power and fast,
affordable storage in a 1U rack-optimized
enclosure. Customers can choose from
two standard server configurations and
one cluster node configuration, as well as
from an array of build-to-order options.
Xserve RAID
Connect Xserve to Apple’s affordable
Xserve RAID storage solution for enormous
capacity—up to 3.5TB1—and advanced data
protection in a high-availability 3U enclosure.
Rack-Optimized Server Design
With enormous processing power and ample storage in a compact 1U-high, 19-inchwide enclosure, Xserve G5 is designed from the ground up for performance, serviceability, and easy integration into a wide range of computing environments. All the
necessary rackmounting hardware is in the box, including rack rails with sliders,
mounting brackets for industry-standard four-post racks and telco center-post racks,
and complete setup instructions. For trouble-free servicing, the power cord connection
has a cable-locking clip, and a cable management arm keeps cables with the system
when you slide it out of a four-post rack.
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
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Indicator lights. Xserve G5 gives you continuous feedback
on the status and activity of hardware components. Indicator
lights display the health and status of power, enclosure lock,
drives, Ethernet links, and processor, as well as drive and
processor activity.
System identifier. Duplicate buttons on the front and back
can be turned on manually or by using remote monitoring
software, making it easy to locate a particular server in a rack.
The buttons also illuminate if a system event occurs.
FireWire and USB ports. Xserve G5 has two FireWire 800
ports on the back and one FireWire 400 port on the front for
high-speed connectivity to storage, backup devices, and other
servers. Two USB 2.0 ports on the back connect to industrystandard peripherals.
Air ducts. A robust cooling system provides front-to-back
airflow over high-performance system components. It uses
large air ducts and an array of eight fans managed by a
microcontroller. For minimal noise and power consumption,
the fans run only as required to cool the system effectively.
If a single fan fails, the others speed up to compensate.
Drive bays. Three bays support up to 750GB
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of hot-plug
SATA internal storage on three independent channels.4Hotplug support allows you to add storage without bringing
down the server. Apple Drive Modules have LEDs that indicate
drive status and health using Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and
Reporting Technology (SMART) data.
Optical drive. The slot-loading 24x-speed CD-ROM drive is
convenient for software installation and recovery. Or choose
the optional Combo drive for reading DVD data and backing
up files on CDs.
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Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Xserve G5 comes with dual
Gigabit Ethernet links on the main logic board. These fast
interfaces operate independently to provide deployment
flexibility and support for large numbers of clients.
Serial port. The DB-9 serial port allows for system access
through a serial console session, even when the network
is down.
PCI-X slots. Two open 64-bit PCI-X slots allow you to add one
card running at up to 133MHz or two cards running at up to
100MHz. Throughput of up to 1GB/s maximizes performance
of transaction-intensive applications and high-performance
networking and storage systems.
Xserve G5 Server Configuration
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Front view
Back view
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
Most innovative HPC hardware
HPCwire, a leading journal of High
Performance Computing, gave Apple its
Editors Choice award for the hardware
vendor delivering the most innovative
overall HPC technology in 2003.
Xserve G5 Cluster
An Xserve G5 cluster uses a dedicated server system as the head node,
which can manage hundreds of Xserve cluster nodes. Apple’s Xserve RAID
adds high-performance, high-availability storage. Each cluster node has
these robust features:
• Computational power. Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors provide high-
performance computation and superior scalability.
• Fast PCI-X. Two PCI-X slots support cluster interconnect technologies, such
as InfiniBand and Myricom’s Myrinet.
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet. Two onboard high-speed interfaces enable independent gigabit connections to the head node for network services and
to the cluster interconnect for loosely coupled cluster environments.
• FireWire 800. Two FireWire 800 ports support small clusters using TCP/IP
over FireWire. FireWire Target Disk Mode allows easy cloning of system
configurations.
• Advanced cooling system. An array of eight fans keeps air flowing over
high-performance processing components. Intelligent management of the
fan array keeps noise and power consumption to a minimum.
• Indicator lights. Xserve G5 provides continuous, at-a-glance information
about the health and status of all the systems in the rack.
• Built-in sensors. Hardware sensors integrate with Server Monitor to provide
easy monitoring of hundreds of systems from a single, intuitive interface.
• Automatic setup. Mac OS X Server makes it easy to set up an entire rack
of systems automatically from a directory on the network or a USB or
FireWire disk.
• Startup options. Front Panel Mode allows the system identifier button
to be used for selecting startup options, such as booting from a network
server or restoring default system settings.
High-Density Cluster Node Configuration
With the compute performance of two superscalar 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors, the
Xserve G5 cluster node configuration is ideal for High Performance Computing (HPC)
in scientific and technical environments, as well as for workgroup clusters and render
farms. One dual processor node can execute over 9 billion double-precision floatingpoint operations per second, or 9 gigaflops per U.That means a rack filled with Xserve
G5 systems can offer over 378 gigaflops of processing power. Single-precision floatingpoint performance is also remarkable: With a dual-pipeline Velocity Engine on each
processor, the Xserve G5 cluster node can execute over 30 gigaflops. Best of all, by
eliminating the cost of unneeded components, Apple has made this high-density 1U
system extremely affordable.
For more information about Apple solutions for computational clusters, see
www.apple.com/xserve/cluster.
Performance Overview
Apple’s new Xserve G5 is designed to deliver phenomenal performance with industryleading ease of use. Thanks to 64-bit processing power, server-optimized I/O, and a
high-throughput storage architecture, Xserve G5 is optimized for demanding server
and cluster operations.
Apple compared preproduction Xserve G5 units with currently available, top-selling
1U servers. The following results are based on benchmark testing performed in January
2004 by Apple in a laboratory setting using publicly available software. These server
configurations were tested:
• Apple Xserve G5. Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5, 1GB PC3200 SDRAM, two 250GB Apple Drive
Modules, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X Server v10.3.2.
• Dell PowerEdge 1750. Dual 3.2GHz Xeon,1GB PC2100 SDRAM, three 36GB Ultra320 SCSI
drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Linux 9.0.
• IBM eServer x335. Dual 3.2GHz Xeon,1GB PC2100 SDRAM, two 36GB Ultra320 SCSI
drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Linux 9.0 (unless otherwise indicated).
• IBM eServer x325. Dual 2GHz Opteron,1GB PC2700 SDRAM, two 36GB Ultra320 SCSI
drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (AMD 64-bit version).
For each system, Apple installed the operating system on one drive and used the
other drive or drives to create a data volume. On the Xserve and Dell systems, the
two remaining drives were configured as a single volume using RAID 0. The Xeonand Opteron-based systems used 15,000-rpm drives.
Processor Performance
Featuring a dual-pipeline Velocity Engine and two double-precision floating-point
units on each 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor, Xserve G5 can manage complex calculations crucial to users in image processing, media encoding, and scientific computing
environments. In fact, the Velocity Engine on dual processor Xserve G5 systems can
execute over 30 billion single-precision floating-point operations per second, or 30
gigaflops per U, compared with 19 gigaflops on the G4-based Xserve.
To demonstrate this superior processor performance, Apple tested Xserve G5 using
popular benchmarks in the scientific computing community.
LINPACK
Computers use double-precision floating-point mathematics to perform calculations
requiring great numerical magnitude or extremely high decimal accuracy. Apple used
the LINPACK benchmark to illustrate the benefits of the G5 processor’s two floatingpoint units. LINPACK measures double-precision floating-point performance by running
a program that solves a dense system of linear equations.
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
Two double-precision floating-point units enable the dual 2GHz Xserve G5 to perform
the linear equations 8 percent faster than the 3.2GHz Xeon-based servers and 50 percent
faster than the 2GHz Opteron-based server.
BLAST
To demonstrate the advantages of Xserve G5 for processor-intensive scientific analysis,
Apple used Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST. BLAST is a popular open
source biotechnology application used by life science researchers to find matches in
DNA and protein sequences. BLAST searches are based on word size, or the number
of nucleotide pairs specified by the researcher to register as a match. Different word
sizes are used for different kinds of research, and users can adjust word size to the
sensitivity appropriate to their needs. With long-word-size, or high-performance,
searches, the researcher is looking for similarities between DNA sequences that are
nearly identical. For short-word-size searches (fewer than11), the researcher is comparing more distantly related sequences; these searches require high resolution to
find the small matches between dissimilar sequences.
In common searches using a word size of more than 11, Xserve G5 far outperformed
the Xeon-based servers. Even at word size 11, for which NCBI BLAST has been extensively
optimized, Xserve G5 performed on par with the competition.
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1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
Word length
Millions of nucleotides per second
Dual 2GHz Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz IBM eServer x325
Dual 3.2GHz IBM eServer x335
Dual 3.2GHz Dell PowerEdge 1750
Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
Dell PowerEdge 1750
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x335
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x325
Dual 2GHz Opteron
9 gigaflops
Billions of floating-point operations per second (gigaflops)
246810
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
LINPACK: Double-Precision Calculations
BLAST: DNA Sequence Matching
$333 per gigaflop
Apple offers compute power at the
lowest cost per gigaflop of any tierone vendor—only $333 per gigaflop,
or $333,000 per teraflop.
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A/G BLAST
A/G BLAST is a version of NCBI BLAST
developed by Apple in collaboration with
Genentech. Optimized for dual PowerPC G5
processors, the Velocity Engine, and the
symmetric multiprocessing capabilities of
Mac OS X, A/G BLAST makes a wide variety
of searches available at higher speeds.
HMMer 2.3.3
HMMer is another application that demonstrates the advantages of Xserve G5
with Velocity Engine for processor-intensive scientific analysis. HMMer is a genome
sequence–matching application that uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to identify
similarities in genetic structures. The core routines of HMMer repeatedly perform the
same operation on large amounts of data. To test the performance of the HMMer
code, Apple searched for an HMM created from a 358-residue sequence in the protein
databank (PDB) and measured the time to search the entire PDB.
The dual 2GHz Xserve G5 performed the HMMer search up to 33 percent faster than the
3.2GHz Xeon-based servers and 69 percent faster than the 2GHz Opteron-based server.
Networking Throughput
To minimize bottlenecks and ensure maximum data throughput, Xserve G5 features
a high-performance I/O architecture optimized for server tasks.
NetBench SMB
Xserve G5 provides the best balance of processor, network, and disk performance—
critical for delivering file services to large numbers of network clients.
With more than 12 NetBench clients, Xserve G5 with Mac OS X Server delivers Windows
file services significantly faster than the Xeon-based server with Windows Server 2003,
and its performance remains high even as clients are added to the network.
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40
80
12 0
160
200
Simultaneous clients
Megabits per second
Xserve G5
with Mac OS X Server
IBM eServer x335
with Windows Server 2003
Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
Dell PowerEdge 1750
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x335
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x325
Dual 2GHz Opteron
33% faster
Baseline
69% faster
Percent faster than Opteron-based system
27% faster
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
HMMer: Genome Sequence Matching
NetBench SMB: Windows File Serving
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