ENGINEERING

NEW YORK, NY -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the newly announced 900 Mhz, 72-way Sun Fire[tm] 15K server outperformed a 1 GHz, 128-way IBM system by over 23 percent on the large FL5L1 dataset, using FLUENT[tm], a leading Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software application. The FL5L1 benchmark models the flow around a fighter aircraft at transonic speeds. In this test, the Sun Fire 15K server demonstrated a 59x speedup on 72 CPUs, which shows near-linear scalability. Sun continues to expand on its ability to produce systems which effectively use all of the CPUs available. Sun's new UltraSPARC[tm] III Cu 900 Mhz processor can also outperform competitive CPUs on a per CPU Basis. For example, the 32-way Sun Fire 15K server also outperformed the 32-way Compaq 833 Mhz system by 32 percent on the FL5M1 dataset. The FLUENT application is used to analyze the flow of gases and liquids around complex structures that occur in the automotive, aerospace, and other industrial engineering applications. Additional capabilities of the Fluent application allow for the simulation of heat-transfer applications. The Fluent 5 benchmark was performed on a 72-way Sun Fire 15K server with 288 GB of memory, running the Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment and Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software. In addition, the code used in the benchmark was compiled for the previous generation UltraSPARC II system to prove that there are no compatibility issues when applications move to the UltraSPARC III platform. The Fluent 5 benchmark also contains 7 other test cases. All of these results can be found at www.fluent.com/