Supercomputing With the Sun Constellation System
Two major research facilities and an elite European university are building their HPC environments around the Sun Constellation System using cutting-edge systems based on Intel's next-generation Xeon processor. At peak performance, their supercomputers will be able to reach speeds as fast as 200 teraflops.
The Sun Constellation System is the industry's only open Petascale computing environment. It's a high performance computing (HPC) system that integrates ultra-dense high-performance computing with network, storage, and software.
Learn more about the Sun Constellation System
Supporting U.S. National Security
Sandia National Laboratories conducts R&D work for the U.S. Department of Energy in the areas of energy and infrastructure assurance, homeland security, defense systems and assessments, nuclear weapons, and nonproliferation. Its research projects require the massive compute power of a Sun Constellation System. This cutting-edge HPC solution uses a Sun Blade 6048 Modular System built with a Xeon 5500-based CPU blade, and Sun's Open Storage system, including the Lustre parallel file system and Sun Storage J4400 Arrays.
Learn more about Sun Open Storage
Powering Research in Germany
Germany's largest HPC center, called Forschungszentrum Jülich, is one of Europe's most important research centers, and its scientists are answering questions about nanoscience, energy management, and the atmosphere. To meet the compute needs of such complex research projects, Forschungszentrum Jülich is building a 207-teraflop supercomputer based on Sun blade servers and Bull NovaScale servers, which are powered by the Intel Xeon 5500 processor. The HPC solution will also include a high-performance I/O system based on Solaris ZFS, the Lustre file system for end-to-end data integrity, and Sun Storage J4400 Arrays for data storage.
Learn more about Sun blade servers
Installing a 200-Teraflop Supercomputer
Germany's RWTH Aachen University is a technical institution whose 29,000 students pursue research in engineering, chemistry, physics, and medicine. It needs an HPC solution that can handle such demanding applications as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and will install a 200-teraflop cluster by the end of next year. The new supercomputer will be based on Intel's Xeon 5500 chip and the Sun Constellation System. It will also feature Sun's state-of-the-art blade technology as well as QDR Infiniband switches developed by Sun. Sun's Lustre file system will manage the data flow between storage nodes and the HPC system.
Read all the details about the RWTH Aachen University
Learn more about Sun's Infiniband switches
|
Optimizing OpenSolaris OS for Xeon
The top five server vendors ship the Solaris OS on their Xeon-based systems. That's because Solaris delivers the superb performance, efficiency and reliability their customers expect from Xeon systems. Sun engineers tune Solaris to take maximum advantage of each new generation and each feature of Xeon processors -- and Intel's new Xeon 5500 is no exception.
Intel's David Stewart, Software Engineering Manager, explains why optimizing the OpenSolaris OS for Xeon-based systems is an important part of Intel's open-source efforts.
And There Are More
Sun customers will receive new Xeon 5500-based HPC systems in the next two months. Institutions including the Juelich European Fusion Supercomputer Center, the Galileu Project at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and Australia's Bureau of Meterology will receive over 4,000 500 Xeon 5500 blade server modules.
That means Sun will deliver over 25,000 Xeon 5500 processors that will produce over 1,100 teraflops of high performance computing power to science, industry and the world at large.
Interoperable Xeon 5500 Systems in Action
The Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University (ANU) are rolling out two interoperable HPC Sun Constellation Systems to build the first major weather forecasting site that uses open source software. The HPC system will include more than 2,500 Sun Blade server modules based on the next-generation Intel Xeon processor.
South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing is building the country's largest HPC solution. It will include three Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems with 144 Xeon 5500-based blade servers and one with 48 Xeon E5450-based blades. The system will also use a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 SPARC64 VII quad-core processors. All together, the supercomputer will provide more than 20 teraflops of peak computing power.
Read all about the Bureau of Meteorology and the ANU
Read all about the Centre for High Performance Computing
|
