In brief, the benchmarks are sysbench’s read-only and read-write tests, and the server has two Intel SSDs, 64GB of memory, and 4 x 12-core AMD Opteron 6172 “Magny-Cours” 2.1GHz CPUs. It is a reasonably typical commodity machine except for the high core count, which is more than I can remember seeing in the wild. The database was MySQL 5.5.7-rc. I am not sure why they didn’t run the GA version of MySQL for this benchmark. Maybe they wrote the paper before 5.5 went GA.
The following are plots of the read-only and read-write scalability models that I generated, based on these benchmarks.
Read more: MySQL Performance Blog