Sun Solution Centers

High-Performance Computing

Among its service offerings, the Sun Solution Centers provide customers and partners with access to hardware and software for high-performance computing (HPC) benchmarking. Customers with compute-intensive commercial or scientific applications can come to test application performance on a grid computing infrastructure which divides a single, compute-intensive job between dozens of systems. The Sun Solution Centers allow customers to run these tests without compromising their own production environments.

Customers have many different options for running benchmarks and performance tests. Often, customers simply send their code to the center, which runs the benchmark and then provides the results to the customer. Some come to the Hillsboro Sun Solution Center with their test code and data, an option usually chosen by customers testing commercial applications.

A pharmaceutical start-up with a bio informatics application recently engaged with the Hillsboro, OR Sun Solution Center to run a set of benchmarks to understand their application's sizing requirements. The application, which is designed to run in a grid-computing environment of 2500 systems, uses an architecture of nodes and servers. The customer wanted to test response time and performance characteristics and learn more about the right ration of application nodes to servers. The Center provided access to Sun experts and technology required to run these tests, allowing the customer to uncover critical data about the application.

Partner Solution Testing

The Sun Solution Centers offer partners technology and expertise to test their solutions on the latest Sun technology, providing critical support to partners developing solutions for Sun customers.

Sun works closely with industry-leading ISVs:

• SAP
• Oracle
• Peoplesoft

These partnerships ensure that their solutions run smoothly on Sun systems. For example, a business unit of one ISVs regional implementation group worked with the Sun Solution Centers to test their software on Sun's newest hardware before installing it at a customer site. The tests allowed the ISV to ensure that their solution was stable and would scale to run on the new hardware.

Partners also work closely with Sun Solution Centers to port their applications that run on older versions of Solaris or other systems, such a Linux or Intel hardware, to Solaris 10.