Feature Story

By Lisa DiCarlo

June 26, 2007 -- It was a mere decade ago that terascale computing took hold in science and engineering communities, giving researchers the tools to break new ground in physics, biomedicine, astronomy, and other areas. Now, Sun is ushering in a new era of high performance computing (HPC) with the Sun Constellation System, the world's first petascale computing environment.

Sun's unique approach to petascale computing combines state-of-the-art technology with system level innovation and off-the-shelf components in an open architecture. The result is a powerful HPC platform that is extremely powerful, easier to manage, and very cost efficient. A technology preview is being announced today; the shipping version will be available early next year.

The Sun Constellation System includes:

• Sun Blade 6000 servers configured with thousands of Sun UltraSPARC TI, AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors; capable of holding up to 48 blades per rack
• Low latency, high bandwidth interconnect with a high-density, 3456-port InfiniBand switch
• Sun Fire X4500 data servers that provide high-density and high-throughput storage; Sun StorageTek tape systems for near-line storage
• Professional services including factory integration services with Sun Customer Ready HPC Cluster
• Comprehensive HPC software support including OpenSolaris, Linux, Sun HPC Clustertools OpenMPI implementation, Sun Grid Engine workload management, and Sun Studio development and performance tools

Leveraging Standard Technologies

Unlike proprietary HPC environments, the Sun Constellation System is based on open, flexible technologies with reusable components. That means the same standard components can be used to build both large and small HPC clusters. The upshot is that organizations can focus on research or product design rather than integration and maintenance of complicated, proprietary systems.

"We're riding the price curve of commodity components, including memory, I/O and CPUs," says Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC systems at Sun. "The secret sauce is in innovation at the system level and how we put everything together. It enables us to radically reduce the amount of complexity for petascale level clusters, making them easier to deploy and manage, and more efficient to own and operate "

The Sun Constellation System is power and cooling efficient, requiring less energy to operate than competing solutions. Applications can be created quickly using familiar tools and interfaces in small environments and rapidly deployed to environments capable of providing hundreds of teraFLOPS of computing power.

The Ranger Cluster and TACC

The first petascale implementation of the Sun Constellation System is the Ranger HPC cluster, which was developed jointly with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of The University of Texas at Austin. When it is fully deployed on the TeraGrid national network of supercomputers in late 2007, it is expected to be one of the most powerful general purpose computing platforms in the world at over one-half petaFLOP peak performance.

The Ranger cluster will deliver 1.7 petabytes of storage using the Sun Fire X4500 data servers, the highest density available. Once completed, the TACC installation will consist of over 80 Sun Constellation System racks of computing power totaling over 15,000 quad-core microprocessors, all connected by Sun's new high density, 3456-port InfiniBand switch. Sun Grid Engine will be used as a resource manager to dynamically allocate compute resources to applications.

Commercial Use

What's remarkable about the Sun Constellation System is that it brings HPC advantages to more general purpose, business-oriented tasks like transaction processing and data mining. Because of its open architecture, broad applicability, flexibility, and lower cost, the Sun Constellation System will open the door to wider commercial use of HPC systems.

Organizations can use HPC clusters as a competitive tool to analyze data, design products, forecast markets or, in financial services, to perform risk analysis. "HPC systems are within reach of a lot more people," says Andersson. "On the commercial side, there's a marriage between the traditional HPC requirements of research with requirements usually associated with mainstream data centers. The Sun Constellation System meets this need for production-ready HPC at petascale."

Commercial companies often have requirements for HPC that go well beyond the product and technology features, to include expectations for how quickly the solution is delivered and deployed and how it will be serviced. The Sun Customer Ready HPC Cluster, which pre-integrates servers, networking, interconnects and software at Sun's factory before it's shipped to customers, accelerates deployment time. The Sun HPC QuickStart Services is a portfolio of services that have been specifically put together to address the needs of HPC customers.

Companies can start with a small HPC cluster and scale up to a massive HPC cluster with thousands of nodes, hundreds of terabytes of memory and petaFLOP level of computing power. The same components, I/O and management technologies can be used to create different types of HPC environments, simplifying how you manage and scale the system over time. HPC environments often create huge amounts of data and Sun's HPC Clusters can easily be integrated with Sun StorageTek near-line storage for long term storage and archival of this data.

Simply put, the Sun Constellation System hits scalability and performance benchmarks that haven't been achieved before. And in the HPC space, there's no shortage of demand for power. Sun has answered the call for next-generation petascale computing with an innovative, flexible approach to HPC clustering that is sure to yield new discoveries and help commercial organizations raise their competitiveness.

Learn more about the Sun Constellation System.