Sun High Performance Computing
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., (www.amd.com) or AMD as it is more commonly known, is a leading global manufacturer of innovative processors for computing, communications and consumer electronics.
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The Sun Systems-based compute farm has really speeded up regression runs. Individual tests were as much as ten times faster.
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— Dr. Joachim Mller, Manager, CAD Design Engineering, Dresden Design Center, AMD
The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks operates under the U.S. Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP).
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With the Sun HPC solution, ARSC is able to provide the computational basis for research and instruction that requires high resolution modeling of the atmosphere including regional weather, prediction of the location and duration of effects of smoke from wildfires, and forecasting the dispersion of ash from volcanic eruptions.
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— Dr. Gregory Newby, Chief Scientist, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
Australian National University (ANU)The Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University have selected Sun Microsystems to implement two interoperable High-Performance Grid Computing (HPC) Sun Constellation Systems in a four-year deal worth more than $30 million (AUD). The deal will also produce the first major weather forecasting site in the world to implement an open source software stack. Blue Sky StudiosAcademy Award winning Blue Sky Studios, a wholly-owned unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, used the Sun Blade X6250 servers and Sun Ultra 24 workstations to animate its film, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Bureau of Meteorology (BOM)The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and The Australian National University (ANU) have chosen to implement two interoperable Sun Constellation Systems, which include the Sun Blade X6275.
“ By
installing over 2500 of these blades in total between the two sites,
our scientists are better able to integrate research conducted at the
ANU facility with our operational systems. The Bureau's Constellation
System will assist us in improving our weather prediction capabilities
through enabling much higher resolution models than we can execute
today.”
— Phil Tannenbaum, Chief Information Officer at the Bureau of Meteorology
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“ The supercomputer, which is being supplied by Sun Microsystems and will
be the most powerful in the southern hemisphere, will be ten times more
powerful than the Bureaus current system. It will be able to crunch
1.5 trillion calculations per second when it is at full operational
capacity in two years time. ”
— Phil Tannenbaum, Chief Information Officer at the Bureau of Meteorology
One of the largest academic medical centers in the United States and a leader in clinical research, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has made advances in healthcare that have impacted hundreds of thousands of lives.
“ We have a remarkable relationship with Sun. The passion of the employees goes far beyond selling equipment. They offer to come in on weekends to help us. The enthusiasm and dedication is something I haven't experienced with any company—ever.”
— Dr. David Agus, Director, Spielberg Family Center for Applied Proteomics, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC)Sun To Deploy South Africa's Largest Supercomputer At The Centre For High Performance Computing. South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), has chosen Sun's HPC solutions, including the Sun Constellation System, Lustre file system, Sun Open Storage and Sun HPC Software, for their unprecedented performance, scale and efficiency. Press Release 03/16/09 Press Release 04/14/09
“ The deployment of the infrastructure for
Phase II at the CHPC, forms part of fulfilling the government's goal to
position South Africa as a beacon of research on the continent and
meeting CHPC's mission to enable South Africa to become globally
competitive through the effective use of high-end IS infrastructure. In
doing so, the needs for the development of high-end IT skills in the
region have been identified and Sun is working toward supporting these
goals with its local partners.”
— Stefan Jacobs, South and Eastern Europe (SEE) systems practice
solution architect for Sun
Chevron is the second-largest integrated energy company in the United States and operates around the world in 180 countries. Founded in 1973, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) is the largest of the seven options exchanges in the United States and has been the leader in options trading volume since its inception 35 years ago.
“ We gain many benefits from Sun technology and our relationship with its staff. The move to Java and the Solaris OS has been instrumental in not only ensuring strong performance in our IT environment, but also in the sustained growth of our business. In my view, the code is portable, but the relationship is not”
— Gerald T. O'Connell, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Chicago Board Options Exchange
Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility SystemsAs one of the top 22 public universities in the country, Clemson University, located in Clemson, South Carolina, is a vibrant academic community of 17,585 students and 1,223 full-time faculty members.
“ They are compact and provide incredible compute power for their footprint," said Dr. James Leylek, executive director, Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems. "We had a fixed amount of square footage, yet we wanted a significant increase in compute power. By using Sun Blade 6000 servers, we kept the square footage the same and went from 7 to 35 teraflops.”
— Dr. James Leylek, Executive Director, Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS)
College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates UnivUAE University is the premier national university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and was recently ranked the top research university in the Gulf by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).
“ Sun Microsystems' leadership in grid/cloud computing together with its historically strong commitment to academe is a powerful combination that will bring lasting value to the College of IT. The grid computing laboratory will provide students, faculty and the community an exciting and dynamic environment to design and implement efficient solutions in service of society.”
— Dr. Rafic Makki, Dean, College of IT
Daimler AG, based in Germany, is a global manufacturer of passenger cars and is the largest producer of commercial vehicles in the world. DLR C2A2S2EC2A2S2E, the Center for Computer Applications in Aerospace Science and Engineering at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), is a globally recognized interdisciplinary center of excellence for numerical aircraft simulation.
“ What was important to us was that we were able to markedly increase the number of processor cores in use. To date, we have been using on average 100 to 500 cores simultaneously, but we are hoping to gradually increase this figure to as much as 6,000.”
— Prof. Dr. Norbert Kroll, head of the Numerical Aerodynamics Branch of the Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and head of the C2A2S2E project
Part of Durham University, the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is an international center for researching the origin and evolution of the universe.
“ I have been using Sun technology for the past 20 years and have always found it to be flexible, stable and reliable. The Sun HPC cluster solutions that we use today enable us to push the limits of research, while we benefit on an operational level from reliable support and a cost-effective solution.”
— Dr. Lydia Heck, Senior Computer Manager, Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated CircuitsFounded in 1985, Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer IIS) performs applied research and development for industry and public institutions.
“ We only use the storage system for the render farm [cluster nodes] it is perfect for this job. Sun tailored the array to our exact requirements. The price/performance ratio couldn't be better.”
— Dr. Siegfried Fößel, Project Manager for Digital Cinema, Fraunhofer IIS
Galileu Project at the Federal University of Rio de JaneiroThe German Climate Research Data Centre (DRKZ) was founded in 1987 to provide the most advanced supercomputing and data and other associated services to the German scientific community for conducting large-scale modeling of earth's systems and climate variations.
“ Our Sun high-performance cluster is the best platform to port our production models to collateral systems.”
— Dr. Joachim Biercamp, Manager of computing science, German Climate Research Data Centre (DRKZ)
High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL)Founded in 1998, High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) is Canada's premier high-performance computing (HPC) center.
“ The capabilities of our new Sun SMP and CMT clusters give researchers a real competitive advantage over what I call the Intel-trained way of doing things which is, 'Wait until we give you a faster CPU.' Sun allows us to operate in the throughput world, where you can get a lot of work done very quickly, simply because you're multithreading over a large number of CPU cores.”
— Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL)
Idaho National Laboratory (INL)In operation since 1949, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory is an applied engineering laboratory dedicated to supporting the U.S. Department of Energy's missions in nuclear and energy research, science, and national defense.
“ The Sun solution offers a strength through the combination of security and flexibility of operation, so that we can provide a greater collaboration environment for the Generation IV nuclear reactor design project and other energy research.”
— Eric Greenwade, Chief IT Architect, INL
IIT DelhiThe Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (SCFBio) at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi was established in 2002 in New Delhi, India.
“ From our perspective, the less we need to worry about the hardware, the better it is for us. This allows us to focus on science, optimize our resources and maximize our compute performance. Sun Microsystems is helping to make SCFBio both a regional center in Asia, and an important part of a global network.”
— Dr. B. Jayaram, Coordinator, SCFBio, IIT Delhi
French organization National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (IN2P3/CNRS) was founded in 1971 to promote research in nuclear physics and high energy.
“ Based on our analysis and pricing and warranty considerations, a final grade was attributed to each vendor's RFP response. Taking into consideration footprints, energy efficiency, solution scope and price, the Sun solutionincluding Sun Fire X4500 serverswas clearly superior to the others. It achieved our energy efficiency objective and provided a minimal footprintsix meters versus nine meters for other solutions we considered and it is extremely reliable.”
— Pierre Larrieu, Purchasing and Public Markets Manager, IN2P3
Instituto Nacional De Pesquisas EspaciaisThe Instituto Nacional De Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), or the National Institute for Space Research, is part of the Brazilian government's Ministry of Science and Technology.
“ This Sun high-performance computing environment is the platform we need to enable us to process a large amount of data very quickly and help us to continually improve upon the quality of our forecasts.”
— Jose Paulo Bonatti, Director, Division of Data and Modeling, CPTEC/INPE
Juelich, Germany's largest HPC center, will deploy a 207-teraflop supercomputer early in 2009 based on Sun Blade servers and Bull NovaScale servers powered by the next-generation Intel Xeon processor, along with a high-performance input-output (I/O) system based on Solaris ZFS and the Lustre file system, guaranteeing end-to-end data integrity. In addition to next-generation blade servers and the Lustre file system, the HPC solution will include next-generation Sun Fire servers and Sun Storage J4400 Arrays. Sun will also install the complete network based on the newest Sun IB Quad Data Rate (QDR) Switches. Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fr Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB)Germany's Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fr Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) is a research institute for applied mathematics and computer science.
“ Our top priority was speed. Other manufacturers primarily focused on virtualization capabilities but couldn't compete [with Sun and LSI Logic] when it came to speed.”
— Wolfgang Pyszkalski, IT Services Manager, ZIB
Korean Institute of Science and Technology InformationThe Korean Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is a government-funded institute promoting national competitiveness and provides cutting-edge research in a variety of disciplines.
“ In the near future, we expect tremendous scalability from the compute nodes and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 and follow on generations. We are also optimistic about the future of Sun x64 servers because Sun has a versatile road map for both blade and rack servers for HPC. Furthermore, Sun is only company that has a complete HPC portfolio, from hardware to software.”
— Sik Lee, Ph.D., Team Leader, Supercomputing Applications Team, KISTI
Korean Ministry of Education and Human Resources DevelopmentThe National Education Information Systems (NEIS) is a computer network that contains educational information for teachers and students in the Republic of Korea (also called South Korea).
“ By offering a platform that runs both Linux and Solaris Operating Systems, Sun helped us build the best possible infrastructure with our limited budget.”
— Kyung-Seop Yoon, Educational Administration Team Leader, International Cooperation and Information Technology Bureau, Korean Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development
Lavel University - CLUMEQLevel 3 Communications, Inc.Based in Broomfield, Colorado, Level 3 Communications, Inc. is a global company that provides communications and Internet infrastructure and services.
“ With Lustre, we can achieve that balancing act of maintaining a reliable network with less-costly equipment. It allows us to replace servers and expand the network quickly and easily.”
— Ken Brookman, Senior Systems Engineer, Level 3 Communications, Inc.
Magna Steyr Fahrzeugtechnik AG & Co KG is a leading partner for automobile engineering and manufacturing based in Oberwaltersdorf, Austria.
“ Sun offered us the best solution at the same price as the technically weaker solutions.”
— Heinz Hauck, Senior System Engineer, Magna Steyr
MetaldyneMetaldyne is a leading global designer and supplier of engine, driveline and chassis products.
“ If you were trying to run all these applications on other types of workstations, it would take about 160 to do the work that our 40 Sun Blade workstations do.”
— Joe Kennedy, Manager of CAE Systems, Metaldyne
National Cheng Kung UniversityNational Cheng Kung University (NCKU) is one of two top universities in Taiwan, with 20,000 students studying in 60 departments within nine colleges.
“ The management of the M9000 server is truly dynamic. In addition to satisfying performance and throughput, the M9000 server eases management efforts and reduces demands on human resources.”
— Dr. Shieh, Ce Kuen, Chairman, Computer and Network Center, NCKU
Paramount PicturesParamount Pictures, owned by media and entertainment conglomerate Viacom Inc., has a library of more than 2,500 films, including blockbusters such as The Godfather, Mission Impossible and Star Trek series, Titanic and Forrest Gump. Sun High-performance Computing Solution Helps Movie Studio Cut Costs and Speed Animated Movie Release
“ Sun provided us with not only superior technology, but also a safety net. The Sun team helped us develop our tools and make the whole pipeline work. We have far more than a business relationship with Sun; it is a true partnership. There is not another vendor that we can turn to and get this kind of support.”
— David Krause, Manager of Technology, Barnyard
Sun support and services help movie studio cut costs and speed animated movie release
“ Sun became an extension of our crew, establishing the kind of relationship that is critical for any film's success. Our honeymoon period has lasted and lasted, and the level of support we have received has increased over time. We have experienced the power of a Sun partnership and it has made all the difference to our success.”
— Aaron Parry, Executive Producer, Barnyard
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) provides computing power and expertise to help scientific and engineering research.
“ We needed both a reliable, very high-performance parallel file system for production research and an open development platform for our research into advanced HPC infrastructure and wide-area file systems. The Lustre File System delivered on both counts with hundreds of researchers using BigBen, and our success with the TeraGrid.”
— J. Ray Scott, Director of Systems and Operations, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Princeton Plasma Physics LaboratoryPrinceton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a collaborative national center for plasma and fusion science.
“ By replacing 190 Athlon systems with 180 Sun Fire X2100 servers, we are estimating a yearly power savings of $80,000. This is an incredible result, far above our original estimates.”
— Paul Henderson, Head of Systems and Network Engineering, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
“ Sandia National Labs is very excited to be one of the first customers for the new Sun Blade X6275 and Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand QDR Switched Network Express Module. In addition, we will also be implementing the Lustre parallel file system to meet our stringent IO bandwidth requirements. We anticipate that the new high performance capacity computing systems we are developing in partnership with Sun will provide us a tremendous increase in our space, power and cost efficiency.”
— Dr. Robert W. Leland, Director, Computing and Network Services Center, Sandia National Laboratories
Sonac, a Japanese venture of Nitta Group's Electronics Division, provides knowledge, services and solutions to speed the process of simulating and verifying LSI circuit designs.
“ By reducing the time it takes for verification testing to complete, we are realizing an efficient verification cycle and can quickly act on the results of the test. So, we are able to complete more thorough testing more quickly for our customers.”
— Mr. Tadashi Matsuoka, General Manager, LSI Business Department, Sonac, Inc.
Synopsys is a leader in providing electronic design automation (EDA) software, services, and intellectual property cores for the semiconductor and electronics industries, with annual revenues of more than US$991 million and a large infrastructure is dispersed across more than 60 locations worldwide.
“ With the help of Sun products, our grid performance meets and exceeds our expectations every time.”
— Sriram Sitaraman, Senior Manager of Information Technology, Synopsys
Technical University of Munich (TUM)The SAP Hochschul Competence Center (SAP HCC) is an educational project of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of Germanys largest technical universities.
“ The clustered architecture Sun designed increases server availability, providing more support for our SAP systems. This allows us to offer more available courses to a wider audience, increasing our stature as one of the countrys largest education service providers.”
— Professor Helmut Krcmar, Manager, SAP Hochschul Competence Center, Technical University of Munich
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin provides one of the worlds most powerful computing resources to facilitate research in all areas of open science.
“ The Sun Datacenter Switch integrates InfiniBand technology at an unprecedented scale allowing people to run across the entire system to achieve exceptional capability and run applications at a larger scale than theyve ever run before. ”
— Tommy Minyard , Associate Director of Advanced Computing Systems, TACC
The Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR)The Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) is a nonprofit scientific institution dedicated to improving human health and recognized worldwide for the quality of its basic research into the nature, causes, prevention and eradication of disease.
“ Sun delivers a powerful infrastructure that easily handles all our data analysis requirements. In addition, Suns continued support and commitment to meeting our needs is extremely important. ”
— Gerry Vest, Systems Administrator, Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research
Tokyo Institute of TechnologyThe Tokyo Institute of Technology—better known as Tokyo Tech—is the largest institute of higher learning in Japan dedicated to studies in science and technology. Sun builds Japan's most powerful supercomputer for Japanese "MIT"
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“ 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.”
— Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Head of Research Infrastructure, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
New Sun Fire Data Servers Keep Japanese Supercomputer Running Full Speed Ahead
“ The Sun Fire X4500 server is proof that careful, clever engineering will result in a solution that has never before been achieved. We consider the Sun Fire X4500 server to be the result of genius-level ingenuity on the part of Sun.”
— Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Head of Research Infrastructure, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
TransactTools is the leading provider of electronic trading connectivity management solutions for the global financial services industry.
“ Solaris 10 on AMD Opteron hardware is one of the fastest performing Java platforms in the market. For most combinations, Solaris 10 outperforms Windows and will match or beat the performance of Linux.”
— Sam Johnson, President and CEO, TransactTools
UCLA, Laboratory of Neuro ImagingBegun in 1983 at the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis, the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) moved to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1987.
“ Our Sun solution helps researchers work faster—and better. Data analysis that would have taken days now takes hours, making it possible to pose more complex questions, and get answers. Now, even a neurobiologist with little computer training has full access to the lab's vast computing power, thanks to the Sun grid solution.”
— Dr. Arthur Toga, Director, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UCLA
University of CalgaryThe Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics at the University of Calgary is a non-profit organization that is advancing technology for computational biology based on Sun solutions.
“ Our applications need to push the edge of bioinformatics research while we address practical concerns like performance, data availability and a limited IT staff. Sun technology has been extremely stable and very flexible, which makes our job of advancing scientific research much easier.”
— Dr. Christoph Sensen, Director, Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics of the University of Calgary
University of CoimbraRanked high among the world's best universities, the University of Coimbra in Portugal is also one of the world's oldest.
“ The new Sun supercomputer Milipeia enables the University of Coimbra to consolidate its leadership role in HPC in Portugal, strengthens its international status, allowing at the same time to keep the high level of the research done at the University. ”
— Pedro Alberto, Dr., University of Coimbra
University of Michigan College of EngineeringThe University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM-Ann Arbor) is a public coeducational university and the flagship and oldest campus in the University of Michigan system.
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“ The College of Engineering chose the Sun Ultra 20 workstations because they offer very attractive price-performance value for engineering and scientific computing and can be installed in a dual boot configuration to run Linux and Windows on the same machine.”
— Paul Killey, Executive Director of Information Technology, College of Engineering, University of Michigan
University of North Carolina at Chapel HillChartered in 1789, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the nation's first state university and a leader in biomedical research. The University improved the productivity of several research groups by implementing a high-performance grid computing system designed for biomedical image analysis. The solution integrates Sun Fire servers, StorageTek systems, and management tools with NVIDIA visual computing systems.
“ Implementing a high-performance computing solution from Sun Microsystems gave us the ability to move biomedical research forward at a faster pace.”
— Russell M. Taylor II, Research Professor with a joint appointment in the departments of Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, and Applied and Materials Sciences, University of North Carolina
University of Notre DameThe University of Notre Dame, founded in 1842, is a preeminent national Catholic university located in Notre Dame, Indiana, adjacent to the city of South Bend.
“ The Sun high-performance cluster gives us outstanding server price-performance and an excellent ratio of performance to power consumedand all in a ready-to-deploy solution that we had up and running within two days of delivery.”
— Dr. Dewitt Latimer, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Center for Research Computing Interim Director, University of Notre Dame
University of Texas-ICESThe Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences was created at the University of Texas at Austin to provide the infrastructure and intellectual leadership for strong interdisciplinary programs in computational engineering and sciences.
“ Our Sun sales representative and our reseller Petrosys Solutions worked on every single point of our solution to make sure that our vision came together for our budget. Our solution offers amazing price/performance.”
— Chris Simmons, Manager of Computing Services, ICES
Founded in 1848, the University of WisconsinMadison has long been recognized as one of America's great public universities.
“ Everything about the Sun Blade 6000 system was just extremely easy and simpler than any product we've dealt with before. Anything that simplifies our physical management, inventory management, or even debugging and diagnosing node failures is a huge win for us.”
— David Parter, Associate Director Computer Systems Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wolfram Research developed Mathematica, the tool of choice at the frontiers of scientific research, in engineering analysis and modeling, in technical education from high school to graduate school, and wherever quantitative methods are used.
“ I am urging Mathematica users who want a powerful development or production system to move to Solaris 10 on Suns workstations and servers based on the AMD processor. ”
— Dr. Steven Christensen, Co-founder, MathTensor, Inc.
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