ACADEMIA

Sun Increases Presence in HPC; New Entries Include Largest Solaris HPC Cluster: At Supercomputing 2006, Sun Microsystems today announced that Sun technology is powering ten of the world's highest-performing supercomputers, as determined by the TOP500 Organization (www.top500.org). Sun doubled its presence on the prestigious ranking, as compared to the TOP500 list released at Supercomputing 2005, with five new entries including the Mississippi State University (MSU) High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2), Sun Solution Center for HPC (high performance computing) and Sun Grid Compute Utility. Today, the MSU HPC2 installation represents Sun's largest HPC cluster based on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced OS on the planet. "Sun is back in HPC in a big way as evidenced by its increased presence in the TOP500 list," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "Sun offers the highest performing x64 systems and industry-leading multi-core technology, which is accelerating its impact in the demanding HPC market. In conjunction with our partners, AMD and NEC, Sun is able to provide the critical processing power required for the world's most compute-intense applications while keeping total cost of ownership at a minimum." Highlights of Sun's entries on the TOP500 list include: - Tokyo Institute of Technology(Tokyo Tech) - TSUBAME, the supercomputer at Tokyo Tech, increased its compute power with a performance of 47.38 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS) as compared to the June 2006 TOP500 list. Tokyo Tech is one of the world's leading technical institutes and TSUBAME combines Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores, totaling 45 teraFLOPS; Sun and NEC storage technologies; and NEC's integration expertise. Using the Sun N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine software, the system is provisioned to support the Solaris 10 OS as well as the Linux operating environment. - Mississippi State University(MSU) High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2) - The HPC2 at MSU has installed a 2,048 processor computing cluster, named Raptor, which is more than four times faster than the most powerful system previously housed at the site, an IBM model called Maverick. MSU's new high-performance computing cluster is the largest Solaris HPC win to date with a peak performance of more than 10 trillion calculations per second. The implementation was built, delivered and installed through the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program and includes more than 500 Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers powered by next-generation AMD Opteron processors. - University of Southern California - The University of Southern California (USC) Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) added 512 of Sun's dual-core Sun Fire servers to its powerful supercomputer cluster. The new x64 servers are in addition to the 360 dual-core Sun Fire servers that USC has already deployed. The USC supercomputing server cluster currently is ranked the 41st fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list. - Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing (HPC) - The Sun Solution Center for HPC in Hillsboro, Oregon is a state-of-the-art benchmarking and solution facility where Sun's HPC customers can "kick the tires" on compute clusters based on x64 technology. HPC experts are on site to assist with over 12.5 teraFLOPS of compute capacity. - Sun Grid Compute Utility - The Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com is powered by the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Fire x64 servers, and is the world's first true compute utility providing access to high performance compute resources over the Internet. Sun Grid software is a pay-as-you-go utility available for the predictable and all-inclusive price of $1/CPU per hour with no long-term contract. For more information about all Sun entries on the Top500 list, please visit its Web site.