At Supercomputing 2006, Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet, today announced an expanded relationship with NEC that will combine Sun's systems innovation strengths with NEC's worldwide systems integration expertise, delivering more advanced high performance computing (HPC) solutions to Sun customers. As part of the agreement, NEC will develop HPC solutions integrating Sun Fire servers and share resources with the Sun Solution Center for HPC in Hillsboro, Ore. "Sun and NEC have worked together previously on multiple HPC projects, including the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) TSUBAME system, the fastest supercomputer in Asia," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. "This expanded relationship will build on our existing strengths, while allowing Sun to broaden its HPC offerings into multiple vertical segments of the enterprise HPC market, such as the automotive industry. In addition, NEC's experience with the Solaris 10 OS will complement their Linux experience, allowing them to offer flexible solutions to customers." The new agreement comprises several elements: - NEC will sell Sun Fire servers as part of their global HPC solutions offerings. - NEC will deploy Sun's servers in its Advanced Technical Computing Center (ATCC) in Houston, Texas. Sun and NEC will also link their benchmarking centers -- NEC's ATCC and the Sun Solution Center for HPC in Hillsboro, Ore. – to perform joint customer and ISV application tuning, benchmarking and staging. - NEC plans to enhance NEC's SX supercomputer offers with Sun Fire servers as a hybrid solution. In addition, NEC is joining the Sun Partner Community for HPC, which provides global partners with immediate access to a comprehensive portfolio of Sun's HPC solutions, sales tools and training programs. For more information on the Sun Partner Community for HPC, please visit: its Web site. "Sun's servers will be a complementary addition to our existing lineup of HPC solutions," said Takayuki Sasakura, General Manager, NEC Corporation HPC Marketing Promotion Division. "NEC also looks forward to leveraging our global systems integration capabilities as we expand our HPC relationship with Sun." "We are extremely impressed with the performance boost the TSUBAME system has achieved in the last few months, in large part due to the extensive R&D conducted with our corporate partners driven by the Sun/NEC alliance," said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor responsible for the Computing Infrastructures at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech, where the machine is installed and operated. "TSUBAME increased its performance in September to 47.38 trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS), up from 38.18 TeraFLOPS in June when we appeared at 7th place on the TOP500 supercomputer list." The Tokyo Tech TSUBAME system is based on Sun Fire X4500 and Sun Fire X4600 servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores and Sun storage technologies. Rapid deployment of the system was made possible through NEC's system integration expertise and the Sun Customer Ready Systems program. To learn more about Sun's HPC solutions, please visit: its Web site