University of Michigan College of Engineering

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The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor College of Engineering (CoE) is highly regarded as both an educational and research institution. To sustain this level of excellence, CoE has to stay at the leading edge of computing technologies. About two years ago, CoE wanted to give its students access to 64-bit computing and also upgrade the performance of its Center for Advanced Computing (CAC). The CAC delivers high-performance computing to CoE and throughout the university. The university has been a Sun customer since the mid 1980s, so it invited Sun to bid on the business.

CoE selected Sun because 1) Sun was one of the first tier-one vendors to offer x64 (64-bit x86) workstations and servers, 2) Sun's proven ability to deliver benchmark-winning platforms powered by the AMD Opteron processor, and 3) Sun servers and workstations have a reputation for reliability and scalability.

CoE has deployed 100 Sun Ultra 20 workstations, spread among electrical and mechanical engineering departments and the Duderstadt Center, a library and high-tech media center used by students from all disciplines. The engineering workstations run Linux and Windows side by side, and host over 360 specialized applications, many requiring 64-bit processing. CoE students use Sun x64 workstations for integrated circuit design, biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, farm equipment design and even modeling of Mars landing craft. Performance and user satisfaction have increased because of the Sun Ultra workstations: One student reports that his computational fluid dynamics program processing now completes in five hours, a 37 percent improvement over the eight hours previously required.

CAC's mandate is to push the envelope of performance for the students and researchers, who are always looking to run increasingly compute-intensive, parallel processing jobs in less time. CAC expanded its cluster grid infrastructure with Sun x64 systems, including 32 Sun Fire V20z as well as Sun Fire X2100 and Sun Fire X4100 servers. The CAC servers run Red Hat Linux and are organized as clusters. CAC chose Sun x64 systems because of the higher quality of construction and reliability, which provides a lower cost of ownership.

By upgrading to Sun Ultra 20 workstations and Sun Fire x64 servers, the College of Engineering has reduced its total cost of ownership while providing students and researcher with higher levels of performance to speed their assignments and research work.