ACADEMIA

High-End System First to Break 200,000; Results Spotlight Server's High Performance and Technical Computing Capabilities -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced its flagship high-end server, the Sun Fire 15K, has delivered the industry's best peak performance results on the SPEC OMPL2001 benchmark. Outclassing both HP and SGI(1), the 72-processor Sun Fire 15K server, configured with 1.2 Ghz UltraSPARC III processors and the Solaris Operating System, is the first server to break the 200,000 mark with a score of 213,466, demonstrating the system's ability to efficiently scale and run large parallel applications in high-performance and technical computing (HPTC) environments. The 72-processor Sun Fire 15K server delivered nearly 8 percent better peak performance than its closest competitor, a 128-processor system from SGI; and 30 percent better peak performance than HP's 64-processor server. These results underscore the power of Sun's crossbar-based SMP Sun Fire architecture which allows memory-intensive HPTC applications to achieve industry-leading scalability and faster time-to-solution. Sun's broad product line has a long history of multiple CPU support, large page features and memory placement optimization which enabled the Solaris OS to handle the large datasets used by SPEC OMPL2001 and allowed the applications to take advantage of the best possible placement of data in memory. The SPEC OMPL2001 benchmark measures the performance of a system's processors, memory architecture, operating system and compilers on compute-intensive parallel processing applications based on the OpenMP standard. Components of the SPEC OMPL2001 test cover a diverse set of important applications including, fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, crash simulations, structural analysis, and high-energy physics. OpenMP allows a user to write directives to specify parallelism in an application. Sun has a long history of providing world-record performance on both technical and commercial applications on general purpose systems that demonstrate near-linear scalability on large shared memory systems. 1) SPEC** and the benchmark name SPEComp** are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above compared to SGI's Origin 3900 and HP's Superdome reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Nov. 10, 2002, and June 17, 2002, respectively. The comparison presented above is based on the peak metric for all systems for which there are submitted results. For the latest SPEC OMP benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/omp/results.