IBM Cloud Virtual Servers and Intel launch new custom cloud sandbox

A new sandbox that uses IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC invites customers into a nonproduction environment to test the performance of 2nd Gen and 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^® processors across various applications.

Performance testing is crucial to understanding the efficiency of complex applications inside your cloud hosting environment. Yes, even in managed enterprise environments like IBM Cloud®. Although we can deliver the latest hardware and software across global data centers designed for maximum availability, it’s your compute strategy that ultimately determines how performance is distributed throughout your workloads. Understanding your system’s performance characteristics before deploying to production is key, which is why cloud sandboxes are helpful. You can test and observe the behavior of a particular workload inside an isolated, nonproduction environment without compromising critical resources. Some cloud sandboxes, like the one we’re introducing today, focus on tracking your server’s performance—like memory, CPU, network and I/O utilization. These types of cloud sandboxes can help determine the level of compute power and budget required for short- and long-term execution. Let’s explore the details.

The new IBM Cloud VPC sandbox allows you to create a nonproduction environment that quickly benchmarks and compares the workload performance characteristics of 2nd Gen Intel^® Xeon^® processors versus 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^® processors on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC. You can choose to test their system performance differences on preconfigured applications with preselected workload benchmarks or deploy your own application for a fully customized evaluation. The IBM Cloud VPC sandbox is automated and runs on your IBM Cloud VPC account by using Terraform and IBM Cloud Schematics as the programmed framework. You’ll own the virtual server resources that you choose to test, which are billed per hour. So, like most customer-managed cloud sandboxes, it’s important to delete your virtual servers and your application environment once your testing is complete. Depending on your application environment, benchmark tests can run in as little as 30 seconds or a maximum of approximately 15 minutes. Contact our sandbox team to join our reimbursement program and get 100% of your costs refunded with IBM Cloud credits.

When testing inside the new IBM Cloud VPC sandbox, you can choose to target benchmarks with a Monte Carlo simulation, Huggingface or Presto. Or, you can bring-your-own (BYO) custom application.

Monte Carlo simulation: The Monte Carlo simulation has become the industry standard in analyzing the statical patterns of large, random data sets for financial workloads. Like the casino game roulette, the element of chance is the simulation’s core modeling approach. When applied inside the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox on two different virtual servers, default load values rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical performance results. You can see the operations per second, memory utilization and CPU utilization for each benchmark ran against your 2nd Gen Intel^® Xeon^®-based virtual server and your 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^®-based virtual server.

HuggingFace inference application: The HuggingFace benchmark application (version Optimum Intel with Pytorch) inside the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox allows you to run and test several natural language processing models with two popular text classification tasks: Bert-base-uncased and Roberta-base. As you run the tests against your 2nd Gen and 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^®-based virtual servers, the performance dashboard will show the model inference time for 100 iterations in milliseconds so you can easily track the performance trend over time.

Data lake application using Presto: Running TPC-H queries on Presto is essential for decision support workloads in massive data lake environments and analytics. Inside the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox, 2nd Gen and 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^®-based virtual servers are measured by running IBM PrestoDB and the gold-star of data warehousing benchmarks: TPC-H. Each test measures query times in milliseconds, as well.

Bring your own (BYO) application: Do you want to deploy your own application to test the vCPU performance of our latest Intel^® Xeon^® processors? No problem. You can quickly and easily upload your installer and runner file from the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox dashboard interface with shell scripts formatting. Or, you can set up your application with IBM Cloud LogDNA. Each option uses Ubuntu 22.04for all performance benchmarks. Once applied, you can compare the average, current and maximum utilization metrics across your 2nd Gen and 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^®-based virtual servers.

1. Create an IBM Cloud account or log in.
2. Use the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox user guide to create your IBM Cloud Schematics workspace, ensure proper permissions, acquire your API and SSH keys and set up your test virtual servers.

Try the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox and get 100% of your costs reimbursed with IBM Cloud credits. Contact our IBM Cloud VPC sandbox team to learn more and ensure program availability.

If you’re curious about deploying your first workload on IBM Cloud VPC, or you’re an existing customer looking to provision new workloads, then be sure to use promo code VPC1000 inside the bare metal or virtual server catalog provision experience. You’ll get USD 1,000 in credits to use toward your new VPC resources—including compute, network and storage components. Note, this promotion in only available with 2ndGen Intel Xeon-based compute profiles and other previous generation profiles.