I saw recently that the newly approved TPC-E Benchmark, a test of OLTP systems, is having a test system submitted by Unisys. They'll be the first ones to send a system, in this case the ES7000, through it's paces with this benchmark.

It's got to be a cool process and I've got feelers out to Unisys to try and dig further into what goes on when you try to build a system to test the benchmark. I have the feeling this will be an interesting story, so be on the lookout for that.

However I'll speculate a little that this has to be a very interesting exercise. The application is static, after all, it's a standard set of routines (I'm assuming) that you'll run against your server. So the challenge is in sizing and tuning your system. Tweak a knob, hit the turbo switch, get advice from the MS guys, it's got to be an interesting day's work.

And I'm sure it's incredibly enlightening. What does file placement mean? How far can you push a system? At the very least you'd think that they'd build some sort of real-time, F1-like dashboard so they can watch the system go.

Heck, that would be a cool job just to build some application to receive the telemetry of the system in real time and display it on some sort of dashboard. Maybe I'll see if Unisys wants someone to work on that aspect of the test system.

Now if we could just have some real-time knobs and sliders on the server to actually adjust various parameters...