SYSTEMS
Sun Microsystems Propels Supercomputer Into 7th Place on TOP500
SPECIAL COVERAGE FROM ISC2006 - Sun-Powered Entry Solidifies Sun's Momentum in High Performance Computing -- Demonstrating its commitment in the high performance computing (HPC) market, Sun Microsystems, systems leads the TOP500 supercomputer list with the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) system. Named TSUBAME, this supercomputer is the fastest in Asia appearing for the first time at 7th place on the list using 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores in Sun Fire Server x64 systems. TSUBAME is Sun's largest HPC deal to date and underscores its tremendous growth in the industry over the last ten years. TSUBAME is also one of the fastest supercomputers outside of the United States as measured by the sustained Linpack performance of 38.18 trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS) as of June 2006. In addition, University of Southern California (USC) increased the size of their TOP500 cluster from a previous score of 10 TeraFLOPS to 13.8 TeraFLOPS placing 24th on the new list. Sun had a total of eight customer entries up from five systems in November 2005.
"It is quite remarkable for us to appear on the TOP500 at such a high place, given that TSUBAME was installed in just three weeks and became operational on April 1st," 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. "Moreover, it has run Linpack for over 11 hours, which is the longest of any machine on the TOP500 list, demonstrating its utmost stability and the reliability for a supercomputer of this magnitude." "Working together, Sun and Tokyo Tech were able to implement one of the largest supercomputers in less than a month, which is virtually unheard of in the industry," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "It's incredible to see how Sun's innovative supercomputing technologies can help HPC customers such as Tokyo Tech break new avenues in research and education." Sun continues to see significant momentum with its x86 line of servers. According to analyst research firm IDC, Sun's x86 technical server unit shipments grew 52.6% year-over-year from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006. Sun was #1 in technical server unit shipments in Q1 CY2006 with more than 19,000 units shipped (Source: IDC Technical Server Qview, May 2006). Sun partners AMD and NEC play pivotal roles in the development of one of Asia's largest supercomputers. AMD offers customers the highest performing x64 processor and industry-leading multi-core technology. NEC, the primary systems integrator, is leading the design of the infrastructure as well as the integration of the various applications which will run on the system, based on their extensive experience in building and managing ultra-scale HPC systems. In addition to working with AMD and NEC, Sun's system also incorporates technology from ClearSpeed Technology Inc., ClusterFS, and Voltaire into the Tokyo Tech system. ClearSpeed Advance Boards installed in the system will be used in the future to accelerate commonly used scientific algorithms; ClusterFS's Lustre parallel file system software allows the servers to communicate with the storage in parallel, speeding access to the ever increasing amounts of scientific data being processed; and Voltaire is supplying high speed multi-protocol Infiniband switches and host card adapters to connect both the servers and storage
"It is quite remarkable for us to appear on the TOP500 at such a high place, given that TSUBAME was installed in just three weeks and became operational on April 1st," 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. "Moreover, it has run Linpack for over 11 hours, which is the longest of any machine on the TOP500 list, demonstrating its utmost stability and the reliability for a supercomputer of this magnitude." "Working together, Sun and Tokyo Tech were able to implement one of the largest supercomputers in less than a month, which is virtually unheard of in the industry," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "It's incredible to see how Sun's innovative supercomputing technologies can help HPC customers such as Tokyo Tech break new avenues in research and education." Sun continues to see significant momentum with its x86 line of servers. According to analyst research firm IDC, Sun's x86 technical server unit shipments grew 52.6% year-over-year from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006. Sun was #1 in technical server unit shipments in Q1 CY2006 with more than 19,000 units shipped (Source: IDC Technical Server Qview, May 2006). Sun partners AMD and NEC play pivotal roles in the development of one of Asia's largest supercomputers. AMD offers customers the highest performing x64 processor and industry-leading multi-core technology. NEC, the primary systems integrator, is leading the design of the infrastructure as well as the integration of the various applications which will run on the system, based on their extensive experience in building and managing ultra-scale HPC systems. In addition to working with AMD and NEC, Sun's system also incorporates technology from ClearSpeed Technology Inc., ClusterFS, and Voltaire into the Tokyo Tech system. ClearSpeed Advance Boards installed in the system will be used in the future to accelerate commonly used scientific algorithms; ClusterFS's Lustre parallel file system software allows the servers to communicate with the storage in parallel, speeding access to the ever increasing amounts of scientific data being processed; and Voltaire is supplying high speed multi-protocol Infiniband switches and host card adapters to connect both the servers and storage