Sun Fire X4600 Servers - Testimonials

Mark Abbott, Dean and Professor, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences Oregon State University

"The new Sun Fire X4600 server from Sun Microsystems will transform our College's scientific enterprise by providing high performance computing in a space not much bigger than a bread box. Developing the next generation of global ecosystem and climate models requires continuous innovation by adding new knowledge about the physics, biology and chemistry of our Earth system. Today, Sun has put the tools right next to the scientist, enabling rapid prototyping of new models to answer the pressing challenges facing our planet. This will unleash a new wave of creativity, much as the desktop computer did for publishing twenty years ago."

Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Head of Research Infrastructure, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center Tokyo Institute of Technology

"Not only is the performance of the Sun Grid HPC environment extremely impressive today, but the ability of the architecture to scale rapidly is really phenomenal, and will enable us to grow our environment to meet our needs for many years to come-no matter how compute-intensive our projects may be."

Neal Tisdale, Vice President, Software Development

"While we have been delighted with the server consolidation capability of the Sun Fire X4200, we are more impressed with the Sun Fire X4600 due to its scalability for larger consolidation projects. With the 4600's 4 to 16-core scalability, we can deploy server consolidation with fewer Sun Fire X4600 servers, and simplify our data center. Since the server upgrades to next generation processors with simple daughter card swap outs, we are hedged against processor technology developments, as well as able to add performance to our facility without disruption to operations."

Peter H. Poole, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Modelling and Computer Simulation Department of Physics, St. Francis Xavier University

"The Sun Fire X4600 servers greatly advance ACEnet's goal to grow the competitiveness of Atlantic Canada's universities. We especially appreciate the performance, the small footprint, and the striking reduction of energy usage. The end result is a reliable and flexible High Performance Computing infrastructure crucial to our world-class science. We are excited by the unprecedented flexibility of the Sun Fire X4600. With 16 cores per server, we can accommodate the needs of both serial and parallel intensive applications with the same infrastructure. This gives us a highly agile High Performance Computing capability,and positions us to compete with anyone in the world."

Miriam Soza, Senior Vice President, Market Data, Thomson Financial

"Thomson Financial focuses on performance in order to deliver financial data to their customers as close to real time as possible. We are constantly looking for opportunities to improve the delivery of data without increasing costs. This focus on performance is expected of our vendors as well. Sun Microsystems has delivered on this during a recent proof of concept which included the newly released Sun Fire X4600 on Solaris 10. Our Options Ticker Application was tested during the Sun Fire X4600 proof of concept and exceeded expectations by improving transactions per second delivered at an improved price point. During the testing, the Sun Studio 11 compiler was also used to optimize the Options Ticker code which contributed to further performance enhancements. Sun Microsystems has once again demonstrated that their focus on performance delivers for its customers."