SCIENCE

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced that it has been conducting a pilot program with The Boeing Company to deploy Sun's new iForce(SM) High Performance Computing (HPC) Storage Area Network (SAN) solution. The HPC SAN is reportedly the first dedicated high-speed storage network suited to the HPC and Technical Computing environments, enabling efficient, high-speed data storage and access across heterogeneous computing platforms. HPC and Technical Computing performance depends on the speed at which data is acquired, processed and distributed, but traditional HPC systems hinder the process by attaching separate storage to each computational platform. As a result, storage systems are expensive, redundant and difficult to manage and expand. The Sun HPC SAN is the first to replace this architecture with a single, efficient system for simultaneous storage and data access across a wide range of computing platforms. As a result, users eliminate the costs of hardware redundancy and create products and solutions more quickly through efficient processing and sharing of data. In addition, the system establishes a single point of data, file system and storage administration, for easier overall management and expansion. In trials, Sun's HPC SAN system demonstrated extremely impressive efficiency over 90% at the high data rates typical of HPC environments. Deployed with a 2.4 GB/second input/output bandwidth between computing platforms and the SAN, the system sustained data movement of over 2.2 GB per second. The Boeing pilot program is being conducted at numerous Boeing sites, where Sun has supported Boeing through a number of projects. Using HPC SAN and Sun's new Sunfire(TM) 6800 line of systems, the team plans to demonstrate data input and output greater than 2.2 GB/second, and to continue to increase speed, efficiency and scale. The pilot will also verify fail-over testing of the metadata controller and the proven fiber optic tape archiving functionality. "We are excited about the potential use of the HPC SAN capability," said Boeing engineer, Mike Mott. "The new HPC SAN solution is visionary. I've never seen a system sustain such bandwidth with so little demand on the system processors. I call it frictionless I/O." The Sun HPC SAN is suited to multiple markets with high volumes of data processing and computing demands, including biosciences, scientific research and development, rich media and oil and gas. For example, with recent advancements in genomics, biomedical research requires increasingly computationally-intense computing with vast amounts of data being processed and shared between researchers; and to create high-tech movie special effects, multiple technicians need to manipulate and share images, of which a single second of film can represent up to two gigabytes of data. "The HPC SAN solution takes our customers over a major hurdle in high performance computing -- fragmented storage and limited data sharing. Now, with centralized data sharing and easily accessible storage, our customers can perform their computing tasks more freely, less expensively and much faster," said Reed Hornberger, vice president of Horizontal Solutions marketing for Sun. Because the HPC SAN solution improves data movements, customers can create their products and solutions in less time -- this has already sparked high demand from a wide range of industries, from medical research to rich media." iForce Solutions Sun's iForce HPC SAN solution is one of a growing number of solutions available as part of the company's iForce initiative. Through its iForce program, Sun works with its best-in-class iForce partner community to deliver customer-driven solutions that solve business problems and help customers reduce risk and time-to-service. Customers can conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations using the HPC SAN solution in Sun's Customer Benchmarking Center in Beaverton, Oregon. Between February and May of this year, nine companies from the fields of aerospace, government, IT and systems integration, previewed the technology in Beaverton, and all agreed that the speed and functionality is superior. For further information visit www.sun.com