Sun announces new products for HPC

PORTLAND, Ore - Sun Microsystems, Inc today announced new products and technologies that extend its HPC leadership, maximize application performance and throughput, and provide superior building blocks for HPC systems. In addition, Sun is announcing new HPC customers, world-record performance and Top500 List results that demonstrate its relentless system innovation. Sun doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS).

“Sun servers, storage and networking continue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems.”

Sun at Supercomputing 2009

Sun is featuring a range of its own HPC technologies at its booth (#435), including servers, unified storage, flash, networking and software, as well as third-party solutions like UniCluster by Univa, ideal for HPC applications.

New products and solutions announced today include:

* Sun Lustre(TM) Storage System Update: Doubles capacity and density with new 2 TB drives, with improved performance on the latest Open Storage platforms
* Sun Blade(TM) X6275 Server Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Version: Extends GbE interconnect to ultra dense blades; provides up to 70 percent more compute density (per rack) than competing blade servers, with up to 9 TeraFLOPS (TFLOPS) of peak performance per fully populated Sun Blade(TM) 6048 server chassis
* Sun(TM) Storage 7000 Family Update: Doubles density and capacity, from 288 TB to 576 TB in a 4RU space; now with InfiniBand and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
* Sun(TM) Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72: Provides ultra-slim, ultra-dense switch fabric solution in 1RU for Sun server clusters up to 72 quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand nodes; seamlessly integrates with the Sun Blade(TM) 6048 Modular System and the Sun Blade 6048 QDR NEM to scale up to 576 servers and storage systems
* Sun(TM) Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 36: Offers customers a self-contained, multi-purpose 1RU 36-node QDR IB switch fabric solution for enterprise applications

* Sun HPC ClusterTools (TM) 8.2.1: Incorporates highly optimized Message Passing Interface (MPI) supporting multiple interconnects including InfiniBand QDR, which can provide improved performance for many HPC applications

Sun Doubles Presence on Top500 List

Sun technologies are powering some of the largest HPC systems in the world, with nearly 2 PetaFLOPS of performance represented on the latest Top500 list released today. Sun doubled its overall presence on the list, including CLUMEQ (Canada), ETH (Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Sandia National Laboratories and University of Zurich.

Sun is also announcing new HPC customers today, including:

National Cheng Kung University (NCKU)

National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) is deploying Sun HPC systems to meet its increasing computing capacity needs for scientific research and study. Its systems are based on a variety of Sun hardware and software platforms, including Sun StorageTek(TM) 6140 arrays, Sun Fire(TM) X2200 M2 servers and X4200 M2 servers, a Sun SPARC Enterprise(R) M9000 server, Sun Fire(TM) X4500 data servers, the Lustre file system and Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS).

CLUMEQ

The Consortium Laval, Universite du Quebec, McGill and Eastern Quebec (CLUMEQ) selected Sun's Constellation System to build a world-class high performance computing and energy efficient datacenter providing over 77 TeraFLOPS. Sun technology includes 10 Sun Blade 6048 modular systems with Sun Blade X6275 server modules, a Sun Lustre Storage System based on the high performance Sun(TM) Storage J4400 array with 1 petabyte (PB) of storage capacity, as well as HPC-related software. CLUMEQ utilizes the Sun Constellation System to conduct complex research studies ranging from climate and ecosystem modeling, high energy particle physics, cosmology and data mining.

German High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research

Sun has supplied Europe's largest storage installation with a Sun Constellation System based on a Sun StorageTek(TM) SL8500 Modular Library System, to the German High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum, DKRZ), one of the centers performing simulations for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report. The DKRZ also utilizes a range of Sun software including Lustre, Sun(TM) Storage Archive Manager (SAM), Sun(TM) QFS and Sun Grid Engine (SGE). The DKRZ provides top-end computing and storage capacity for complex simulation models. The new system provides a total of 65,000 media slots enabling over 65 PB to be stored on T10000B magnetic tape cassettes.

Sun Systems Shine with New Records on HPC Benchmarks

Ranging from desktop to some of the world's largest installed systems, Sun Constellation Systems deliver outstanding performance results while demonstrating near-linear scalability and efficiency on various HPC workloads. Today, Sun announced the following benchmark results:

NAMD: The Sun Blade 6048 chassis with 48 Sun Fire X6275 blade servers (768 cores) and QDR InfiniBand, delivered the best published result on the molecular modeling NAMD benchmark, with up to 95 percent better performance than double data rate (DDR) IB and a scalability efficiency of nearly 80 percent(2).

FLUENT and RADIOSS: Sixteen Sun Fire X6275 blade servers (256 cores) outpaced a competing SGI Altix ICE system with the same number of cores, on one of the most popular MCAE applications – FLUENT. FLUENT software solves fluid flow problems and is based on a numerical technique called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which is heavily used in the automotive, aerospace and consumer products industries(3). In addition, Sun's cluster beat the SGI Altix ICE system using the prominent MCAE 'crash' code, RADIOSS from Altair, by over 40 percent(4).

Reverse Time Migration (RTM): The Sun Blade 6048 chassis with 12 Sun Fire X6275 blade servers, interconnected via integrated InfiniBand QDR Host Channel Adapters (HCA) and Quad Data Rate Switched Network Express Modules (QNEM) and using Lustre file system delivered up to 20x performance improvement over traditional Gigabit Ethernet/Network File System configurations. RTM is the most popular seismic processing algorithm often used in geophysical studies to produce quality images of complex substructures. Sun's Constellation System offers a unique platform for customers looking to reduce their seismic processing time by a factor of two(5).

SPECviewperf 10 and SPECfp2006: The Sun Ultra(TM)27 workstation delivers best performance in its class on SPECviewperf 10 3D graphics rendering benchmark. Running OpenGL on Windows Vista OS, Sun's workstation surpassed similar HP and Dell products on six out of eight tests(6). The Sun workstation, with OpenSolaris(TM) and Sun(TM) Studio software, continues to hold a single chip world record on the SPECfp2006 benchmark, making it an ideal platform for floating point intensive applications used by CAD/CAM designers and MCAE engineers alike(7).