The Future
A powerful set-up, although at the moment it does have a drawback. In the entire processor there is just one floating point unit (FPU), which has to be shared between the maximum of eight cores. This makes these servers less suited to arithmetically challenging purposes.
In the current set-up, this new generation UltraSparc processors is also not yet suitable for multitudes of processors in a single machine. This feature is reserved for a next generation that will be expected in the course of the coming year. This T2 will also support eight threads per core, and every core will have its own FPU. Development of this core is also done in a unique way: Sun has turned it into an open source project (http://opensparc.sunsource.net).
Solaris
The servers with the UltraSparc T1 are bundled with Solaris 10. The new processors show up as a regular multiprocessor system in the OS, which means applications written for Solaris 10 work flawlessly with the new architecture. Highlights of the operating system are the excellent management utilities. This is certainly the case with this new processor: cores in the processor can be switched on and off individually, and furthermore it's possible to create processorsets, consisting of several logical processors which are linked to certain processes or threads.
It's also possible to use the Solaris Containers which hand over your partioning and virtualisation possibilities to a Solaris institution. You could, for example, easily divide a single UltraSparc T1 server into different containers, each containing its own independent environment. The use of Solaris Zones then provide the possibility to run individual programs in their own protected, isolated environment. Solaris 10 comes with extensive diagnostics, including error management, and the system is set up to solve as many problems as possible on its own accord with Predictive Self Healing.