Three recent partnerships in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC) demonstrate how research universities rely on Sun products and technology to build supercomputers that advance human understanding in the areas of high energy physics, genetics, computational biology, and nano devices.

HPC makes it possible for researchers to conduct experiments that would otherwise be impossible — studying the dynamics of the Earth's climate in the distant past, for example, investigating how the universe developed, or discovering how complex biological molecules mediate the processes that sustain life.

The results of this research promise to dramatically improve our quality of life with discoveries that combat hunger, map the universe and the human genome, and provide a cure for common diseases. Sun systems enable researchers to achieve greater performance on vastly larger problems, with higher resolution and accuracy, than ever before.

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
In September 2006, the National Science Foundation made a five-year, $59 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to acquire, operate and support a high performance computing system. TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 teraflops, making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 terabytes of memory and 1.7 petabytes of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD's forthcoming quad-core processors.

Researchers from across the U.S. will have access to this supercomputer. Bob Sugar, a research professor in the department of physics at the University of California, and his colleagues anticipate using the system to advance their research into the fundamental forces of nature to obtain a deeper understanding of the laws of physics — electromagneticism, weak interactions, and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions. They will also study the properties of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, such as those that existed immediately after the Big Bang.

Klaus Schulten, the head of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducts groundbreaking research in computational life science, investigating how cells in all organisms synthesize new proteins from genetic instructions and how plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Schulten also assists bioengineers in developing medical nanodevices. Schulten expects that the new TACC/Sun system, combined with his group's award-winning parallel molecular dynamics code, will simulate the largest structures yet of living cells. This will turn the TACC/Sun system into a new type of microscope that shows how viruses infect human cells, how obesity is fought through the cell's own proteins, and how nature harvests sunlight to fuel all life on Earth.

Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR)
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) a not-for-profit research institute based in Rockville, Maryland, selected Sun Microsystems to replace 15 HP Alpha servers and consolidate IT operations onto three Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers to power its complex genomic assembler for molecular research. Research conducted at TIGR has helped deepen the understanding of life processes by producing DNA-specific research applicable to a wide range of applications in medicine, agriculture, energy, the environment, and bio-defense. Genome assembly is a computationally intensive process of rebuilding a large number of short DNA sequences generated by a sequencing project. The Sun systems helped to stretch the Institute's IT budget by offering a competitive purchase price and more importantly technology that reduces power and cooling requirements by more than 70 percent.

UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI)
UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) selected Sun to create an affordable HPC grid to help improve the study of the brain. Based on the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun N1 Grid Engine, 306 Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorEdge L8500, the grid will run complex and data-intensive algorithms to assist LONI in researching causes, cures and treatments for ailments such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, and analyzing brain development.

Scientific discovery has the potential to solve some of the most complex problems facing mankind. Yet funding for research is competitive and researchers must maximize scalability and compute performance to quickly obtain results.

Sun's investment in innovation allows research institutions to trust Sun with their compute infrastructure for several reasons. For one, Sun beats the competition on price and performance. Sun technology also affords long term dividends in reduced power and cooling costs. Sun's reputation, commercial stability, and HPC engineering expertise combine to ensure reliability and scalability.

I look forward to the day when the results of these research partnerships create breakthrough innovations that ease human suffering and dramatically improve everyone's quality of life.

Sincerely yours,

Kim Jones
VP, Global Education, Government, and Health Sciences

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