SCIENCE

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced the release of Sun HPC ClusterTools(TM) 4 software, providing high performance computing (HPC) capabilities designed specifically for resource-intensive, high performance and technical computing environments. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software provides a complete environment to develop and manage a workload of highly resource-intensive applications on individual Sun systems, as well as clusters of these systems. The source code for Sun HPC ClusterTools software is freely available for developers through the Sun Community Source Code License (SCSL) model. The SCSL model is a result of Sun's continued commitment to the open development of key technologies and is designed to spur innovation and foster a broader relationship with the technical computing community. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software includes a new high-performance, multi-protocol implementation of the industry standard Message Passing Interface (MPI), a full implementation of the MPI I/O protocol, and tools for debugging, performance analysis and tuning of technical computing applications. Developers can now easily port existing applications to individual and clusters of Sun Enterprise(TM) systems and Sun Fire(TM) symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)-based systems that host both portable and applications. With scalability of up to 2048 processes and 64 nodes, customers can achieve fast development to production time in a stable and scalable environment across a grid of systems and clusters. The software suite features Prism(TM) graphical programming environment, allowing the developers the ability to effectively debug, performance monitor and tune large-scale parallel applications with the same efficiency as single process applications. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software also supports parallel I/O operations, which can span across multiple storage systems and multiple processors with Sun Parallel File System, allowing parallel applications to read and write large data sets without introducing serial bottlenecks at single storage device interfaces. "Today it is clear that the future of supercomputing is network-centric. With this new software release, Sun is pushing well into the Terascale realm with our highly scalable clustering capability, giving commercial and scientific communities the solutions they need to share large scale computational resources and complex data," said Stephen Perrenod, Group Manager of HPC Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software brings Sun's network computing vision to high-end technical markets with a market-leading integrated parallel application development environment that enables end-to-end scalability from individual single-processor Sun Blade(TM) 100 workstations to Teraflop capable clusters of Sun Fire Midframe systems." Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software is the latest offering in bringing Sun's HPC vision of a single binary compatible architecture and family to thousands of processors. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software environment supports a wide range of compute environments from small to large SMPs and thin-node to fat-node clusters on which customers can deploy their complete application portfolio. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software suite includes significant enhancements including: scalability to 2048 processes and 64 nodes, support for UltraSPARC(tm) III based systems, Loadable Protocol Modules, Remote Shared Memory(tm) protocol over the new generation of Sun interconnect hardware, and advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) and security features. Designed to meet the scalable performance challenges in resource-intensive parallel computing environments of the automotive, aerospace, oil and mineral exploration, financial modeling, life sciences, bioinformatics, academic research and development, and government research and defense industries, Sun has already successfully deployed the Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software at various technical and high performance computing centers around the world including RWTH Aachen, University of Edinburgh, Danish Technical University, Myricom, Inc., and University of California at Davis. "Once installed, Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software has made a quick and direct impact on my research group's activities in parallel and distributed computing," said Neils Gronbech Jensen, professor of Applied Sciences, University of California Davis. "The software features and their documentation have made it easy to get started and port existing parallel codes to our Sun cluster of systems." Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software will be offered for free direct Web download without Sun service and support for an unlimited number of users at www.sun.com/software/hpc/tryandbuy.html . The complete product suite is available across the entire Sun system product line, running the Solaris(TM) 8 Operating Environment, and can be licensed for 750 USD per system domain, including Sun service and support. The source code for the new Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software will be offered for free to developers through the Sun Community Source Code License program at www.sun.com/solutions/hpc/communitysource