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SAN FRANCISCO -- Addressing the increasing demand for the combination of high-performance and highly productive computing, Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun Fire(TM) Superclusters based on the Sun Fire 6800, Sun Fire 12K and Sun Fire 15K server platforms. Outclassing competitors with a solution that provides an open platform to thousands of applications and increases access to compute resources via Sun(TM) ONE Grid Engine software, Sun's new Sun Fire Superclusters also feature Sun HPC ClusterTools(tm) 5 software and Sun's industry-leading Sun Fire Link interconnect technology. With this combination, Sun is delivering a ready-to-deploy compute powerplant which scales up to two Teraflops and is capable of delivering high performance with high utilization -- two attributes that are usually viewed within the industry as trade-off choices. "With our Sun Fire Superclusters and Sun Fire Link optical interconnect, Sun is offering a unique solution for highly productive computing for the so-called capacity computing segment," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Sun's High Performance and Technical Computing business. "When it comes to creating a high performance, highly productive computing environment, our competitors can't match the scope of tools, ISV applications, storage and visualization capabilities available on Sun platforms." Solutions for the World's Toughest Computational Tasks Targeted to serve the high-end computing requirements of government agencies, education and scientific institutions, Sun's Sun Fire Supercluster solutions are designed to provide increased performance and maximum productivity for a range of critical computational challenges, including life sciences, weather and ocean forecasting, cryptanalysis, virtual manufacturing and failure analysis. Additionally, the open nature of the Sun Supercluster architecture enables users to collaborate and create evolving computing environments able to adapt as their problem solving needs expand or change. Sun Supercluster systems deployed at the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL), Aachen University of Technology and Cambridge University, as well as in government institutions are already contributing significantly to the advancement of science and technology. "Sun's strategy to deliver a complete Supercluster solution is key to generating momentum in the high-performance technical computing space," said Earl Joseph, Vice-President, High Performance Systems, IDC Research. "Aiming directly at the capability computing segment with the Sun Fire Link interconnect and additional tools that support highly performing and highly productive computing environments, we expect Sun's Supercluster solutions will help increase interest in clustered solutions deployment throughout the industry." The Plant Behind the Power Sun's Supercluster platform of servers, software and interconnect technologies are built on the industry-leading Solaris(tm) Operating Environment and Sun ONE platform, and include the following elements: -- Sun Fire 6800 server -- Features from two to 24 1.2 Ghz UltraSPARC(R) III processors, up to 192 GB of memory, 32 PCI slots or 16 hot-swappable cPCI slots, and one to four Dynamic System Domains. The system offers mainframe-class availability and resource management features, including full hardware redundancy, online upgrades, hot CPU upgrades and Dynamic Reconfiguration. -- Sun Fire 12K server -- Supports up to 52 UltraSPARC III 1.2 GHz processors, up to 288 GB of memory, up to nine hot-swappable, interchangeable Uniboard CPU/memory boards for easy, dynamic resource provisioning, and fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains. -- Sun Fire 15K server -- Sun's flagship high-end UNIX server, the Sun Fire 15K system features the Solaris (TM) Operating Environment and up to 100 UltraSPARC III 1.2 GHz processors, more than half a terabyte of memory in a single domain, and fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains. -- Sun Fire Link interconnect -- Breakthrough technology that boosts high-end functionality in the data center and supports industry-leading 4.8 gigabytes per second peak throughput, and peak performance of up to two TeraFlops -- two trillion floating-point operations per second -- in a cluster of systems. -- Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software -- A tightly integrated toolset for managing a workload of resource intensive, message passing applications, Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software enables customers to manage their complex, parallel computing applications on clusters of Sun's high-end systems. -- Sun ONE Grid Engine software -- Sun's flagship distributed resource management product, Sun ONE Grid Engine software enables the pooling of resources and increases resource utilization up to 90 percent and higher. -- Sun ONE Studio 7 software -- Complete language systems and tools designed to speed software development to create and maintain programming projects, simplifying the tasks that are performed most often: editing, compiling, building, debugging, and tuning. Pricing and Availability The Sun Fire Superclusters will be available worldwide from Sun beginning April 15. The base configuration with two Sun Fire 6800 server nodes, the Solaris 9 Operating System, the Sun Fire Link interconnect, Sun HPC ClusterTools 5, Sun ONE Grid Engine and Sun Studio 7 software starts at $2,119,230. For simpler, safer, swifter deployment, the Sun Fire Supercluster solution platform will be available through the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program.