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High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) requires dedication of large amounts of computing resources to solving complex data-intensive problems. This implies multiple processor systems capable of aggregate performance of several Gigaflops (billions of floating point operations per second) or better, fast networks, and data storage in the Gigabyte or Terabyte range. Traditionally the domain of engineers, physicists, astronomers, chemists and other scientists, high performance computing has become an invaluable tool for commercial computing users in sectors such as financial services.
Major industries that rely on HPTC solutions include:
- Government: The public sector has a growing array of high-performance computing needs, especially focusing on the need to conduct advanced simulations and enhance images, perform pattern recognition, and crack signals faster with more fidelity and confidence. The need is especially critical in defense, intelligence, and homeland security. And, while computation requirements are increasing, so is the need to improve turnaround to decision makers, who have less time to make critical decisions. A key component of the solution is the need to deal with increasingly large and diverse datasets originating, not only from traditional computing systems, but new generations of wireless communications devices.
- Manufacturing: The automotive, electronics, high-tech machinery, and aerospace sectors have huge needs for powerful HPTC solutions. For instance, finite-element analysis and computational fluid dynamics applications reduce the costs and improve the designs of automotive and aerospace products. HPTC also plays a pivotal role in electronic design automation (EDA), dramatically reducing chip design times and manufacturing life cycles. Sun HPTC platforms are supported by the leading providers of mechanical computer-aided engineering (MCAE), EDA and other relevant applications.
- Life Sciences: Scientists in the biotechnology, agribusiness, pharmaceutical, and specialty chemicals industries have been struggling for years with how to best manage and analyze the massive amounts of information contained in each segment of DNA, be it plant, animal, or bacterial. Creating models of that information using visualization software that can interoperate with other tools, or can be used to query a database of gene sequences to find matches is even more critical. The Sun Fire 15K server excels in both computing areas. As life sciences organizations become increasingly innovation-driven, Sun can help architect, build, and offer the infrastructure technologies that can help them meet their HPTC computing needs.
- Energy: The petroleum industry uses HPTC for seismic data processing and reservoir simulation. Sun and its technology partners offer a wide range of solutions, from dual-channel to multi-channel visualizations. Thanks to our commitment to open platforms and industry standards, we can deliver visualization solutions that are less costly than the proprietary supercomputing platforms traditionally associated with this sector. And, because our lowest-cost solutions eliminate the need for expensive, dedicated facilities, Sun is lowering the barriers to visualization, making it affordable to more organizations, as well as more workgroups within the organization. In addition, petroleum company data warehouses often range into the tens of terabytes. These types of large data warehouses present complex data management issues and require enormous processing power to effectively mine the data. The planned capability to create clusters of multiple Sun HPTC systems will help enable users to conduct extremely sophisticated queries on larger databases in less time.
- Academic/Research: Universities, private labs and government labs around the world apply HPTC to advancing the state of the art in physics, chemistry and biochemistry, and in the engineering disciplines, among others. Many research groups are working on so-called "grand challenge" problems with practical applications such as: magnetic recording technology, rational drug design, high-speed civil transports, catalysis, fuel combustion, ocean modeling, ozone depletion, air pollution, design of protein structures, and quantum chromodynamics, to name a few examples. These researchers often develop their applications "from scratch" and rely upon Sun's excellent compilers, performance analyzers, and other developer tools.
- Financial and Business Analysis: The banking and investment industry uses for HPTC include data mining, decision support, and portfolio optimization and risk management applications. Although database computing is not usually thought of as compute-intensive, sophisticated analytical tools are being applied to extract information from larger and larger databases, making them candidates for large amounts of computing. The performance, load-sharing capabilities and scalability of Sun's HPTC servers are well-matched to the most compute-intensive aspects of the financial services industry, including such demanding applications as derivatives analysis and portfolio/securities analysis. In the insurance industry, the Sun HPTC platform provides the compute performance to handle the sophisticated actuarial analysis needed to support the underwriting process, which could process problems at a fraction of the time usually required by traditional mainframes.
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