Feature Story
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November 12, 2007 -- This week, Sun Microsystems is showcasing its innovative portfolio of high performance computing (HPC) solutions at SC07, the international conference for HPC in Reno, NV. Leading the charge to next-generation petascale computing is the Sun Constellation System, the world's first open HPC architecture capable of scaling from departmental clusters all the way up to the largest supercomputer in the world. The Sun Constellation System is a tightly-integrated, massively-scalable HPC architecture that dramatically reduces complexity and delivers breakthrough performance and economics to organizations that require maximum compute power or headroom to grow. "We're leveraging industry-standard components and general-purpose architectures to drive costs down, make clusters easier to use and help both research institutions and companies solve grand problems and use HPC for business critical functions," says Bjorn Andersson, Sun's director of HPC systems. CommunitiesNew Additions to Sun's HPC Portfolio
Sun is also rolling out or previewing other additions to its HPC portfolio that leverage the company's relentless innovations in software, systems, storage, and services. These include:
Also being previewed are:
Unparalleled Performance and Scalability
The Sun Constellation System can scale up to 13,834 nodes. A cluster of that size is capable of up to 2 petaFLOPS of peak performance, 1.8 petabyte of memory capacity, 0.7 exabytes of storage, and 1 petabit per second of fabric speed at less than 700ns latency. It is the highest-performance system available today, and scales to twice the performance of IBM's BlueGene. The Sun Constellation System also features the following key components:
Ease of Administration
Historically, high performance computing has been synonymous with proprietary systems or interfaces. Not so with the Sun Constellation System, which is based on open, flexible technologies with reusable components. This enables customers to use the same standard components to build both large and small HPC clusters. "Clusters are still viewed by many as something complex, but we are using an open computing platform and general-purpose technologies to make it easier to build out and own large clusters. We're essentially making extreme computing more accessible and easier to use for the mainstream," says Andersson. The Sun Constellation System delivers breakthrough performance and scalability while dramatically reducing complexity and increasing efficiency. Its ultra-dense InfiniBand switch and ultra-dense blade servers mean fewer components are required to achieve peak performance. Fewer components mean simplified management and administration, and fewer points of failure. The Sun Constellation System has six times fewer cables and fifty percent fewer server racks. The result is an extremely scalable, high performance computing solution designed for production use and delivering industrial-grade reliability. Backed up with Services
All of this breakthrough technology is backed up by Sun's comprehensive services. The Sun Customer Ready Program, which builds and tests systems to customer specifications in Sun's ISO-9000-certified factories, can reduce installation problems by up to 50 percent and accelerate deployment from weeks to days. Having the upfront work performed by the people who know Sun technology best, Sun's own engineers, minimizes downtime and ensures rapid deployment. The Sun Constellation System heralds a new era in high performance computing. With the world's first open petascale computing architecture, the system hits performance benchmarks that haven't been seen before. And its flexible, efficient approach to HPC clustering is sure to help a greater variety of companies sharpen their competitive edge. Learn more about HPC solutions from Sun. |
Audio Download
Hal Stern welcomes Josh Simons, Sun distinguished engineer for an insightful discussion about the high performance computing market.
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Oracle is reviewing the Sun product roadmap and will provide guidance to customers in accordance with Oracle's standard product communication policies. Any resulting features and timing of release of such features as determined by Oracle's review of roadmaps, are at the sole discretion of Oracle. All product roadmap information, whether communicated by Sun Microsystems or by Oracle, does not represent a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.
