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Sun demonstrates the scalability and simplicity of the Sun Constellation System by offering Reference Designs of different capacities, using a building-block approach. The Sun Constellation System provides massive scalability, enabling a supercomputing environment to be built with up to 13,824 nodes using 4 Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 core InfiniBand switches, offering over 1.9 PetaFLOPS[1] of compute performance in addition to storage and visualization systems. With the simple and modular design of the Sun Constellation System, one can easily scale down into TeraFLOPS-class configurations. Sun has leveraged its expertise in building petascale systems: we start with the latest supercomputer that Sun has deployed, and show examples of smaller designs.
A supercomputing system needs a lot more than fast compute engines. The Sun Constellation System Reference Designs contain blade compute nodes, fast parallel file systems using data servers for shorter-term data, efficient storage systems for longer-term archive, and state-of-the art visualization systems for analysis and collaboration. In addition, Sun offers a complete stack of management and development software, available on multiple operating systems.
Design A: Based on the TACC Ranger system
Design B: A supercomputer system using a single Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 core switch with room for greater than 2x growth
Design C: A supercomputer system using a single Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 core switch with room for greater than 6x growth
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Interconnect |
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2 core switches |
1 core switch |
1 core switch |
Compute |
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82 racks |
30 racks |
10 racks |
48 blade servers per rack |
3,936 nodes |
1,440 nodes |
480 nodes |
Up to 4 quad-core processors per blade |
Up to 62,976 processor cores |
Up to 23,040 processor cores |
Up to 7,680 processor cores |
Peak theoretical performance[2] |
Up to 579 TeraFLOPS |
Up to 210 TeraFLOPS |
Up to 70 TeraFLOPS |
Short-Term Data Cache |
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3 Large + 7 Expansion configurations |
1 Large + 2 Expansion configurations |
1 Large configuration |
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74 |
22 |
6 |
Total raw capacity |
Up to 3.55 PB |
Up to 1.06 PB |
Up to 288 TB |
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6 |
2 |
2 |
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3 |
1 |
1 |
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10 |
3 |
1 |
Long-Term Retention and Archive |
Sun StorageTek tape libraries |
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1 or more Sun StorageTek SL500 modular libraries, up to 460 TB each |
- Storage management servers: Sun Fire X4600 server, attached to Sun StorageTek 6540 array
- Sun StorageTek SAM and QFS software
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8 |
4 |
2 |
Visualization |
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8 |
3 |
1 |
NVIDIA Quadro Plex VCS graphic units |
16 |
6 |
2 |
Management |
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Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Management Servers: Sun Fire X4600 server |
8 |
6 |
4 |
Development |
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Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Operating Systems |
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[1] Peak theoretical performance
[2] As of Feb/2008
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