SYSTEMS

At Supercomputing 2005, Sun Microsystems today announced significant performance upgrades to its Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered by the high-performance AMD Opteron processor, new high performance computing (HPC) tools and applications for x64 and SPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), alliances with HPC industry leaders, and breakthrough storage technologies to enable rapid deployment of power-efficient Terascale compute clusters. With the help of Sun's innovative HPC solutions and industry-leading alliances unveiled today, customers can maximize productivity, lower risk, reduce cost and complexity in the data center, and speed time to market, while embracing deployment-ready Terascale HPC and grid solutions to unleash the power of innovation. "Our presence and announcements at Supercomputing this week demonstrate that Sun is a leading player in high performance computing and focused on aggressively growing our HPC offerings," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's industry-defining x64 and SPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers -- combined with our information management solutions and engineering brilliance -- give us a competitive advantage in this market, allowing us to bring no-risk, leading- edge HPC capabilities to customers. Moreover, Sun's legacy of building innovative alliances with companies such as Luxtera, Inc. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency continue to be a driving force behind next-generation compute offerings." Customers Around the World Leverage Sun's x64 Solutions for Large-scale HPC Clusters In a separate announcement today, the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has purchased Sun Fire x64 servers to build Japan's largest supercomputer. Tokyo Tech's project will use Sun Fire x64 servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores, Sun storage technologies and NEC's integration expertise to build the Tokyo Tech supercomputer. The system will help provide researchers with compute power for a wide range of scientific applications, such as analysis of the complex molecular structure of proteins, simulated blood flow diagnosis in human brains, and clarification of the generation mechanism of Earth and planetary magnetic field. This marks Sun's largest HPC win to date. Furthermore, Sun recently announced that Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) Canada will build the largest HPC network in Atlantic Canada based on the Sun Fire x64 servers. ACEnet's grid will be a service for a wide range of research, including oil and gas, marine engineering, pharmaceuticals, underwater vehicles, physics, physical oceanography, and computer science throughout Atlantic Canada. In addition, Sun last week opened its Sun Solution Center for HPC, a testing and benchmarking facility located in Hillsboro, Ore., that is designed to make HPC practical and attainable for a wide array of customers and partners. The facility offers customers access to world-class scientists and algorithm experts who specialize in developing and deploying large-scale HPC solutions based on best practices, and also provides them access to some of the highest-performance x64 and SPARC processor-based systems on the planet. In this unique environment, customers and partners have a low-risk method of deploying and running their applications on a variety of environments, including the Solaris 10 OS, and standard distributions of Linux and Windows. To learn more about the Sun Solution Center for HPC, please visit its Web site. Sun Fire Servers Outdistance the Competition and Continue to be the Fastest in their Class The Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers are now available with AMD's newest, highest-performing multi-core AMD Opteron Model 285 SE processor, outperforming similar competitor's systems based on dual-core Intel processors. The Sun Fire X4100 server with one AMD Opteron Dual Core processor Model 285 SE comes equipped with the Solaris 10 OS, 36GB SAS disk drive, 1 GB memory, and KVMS enabled service processor, and is competitively priced from $4,161 (USD). More information on the Sun Fire x64 servers can be found at its Web site. The combination of Sun Fire x64 servers, Solaris 10 OS, and Sun Studio 11 software delivers new world record performance. In addition to more than 50 world record results posted to date, the Sun Fire x64 systems, powered by the latest multi-core processors, have established the following new performance records: -- World Record SPEC OMPM2001 result for systems with up to 2 sockets and 4 threads The Sun Fire X4100 server beats IBM and HP systems running compute-intensive applications. The 4-way Sun Fire X4100 server, with two AMD Opteron 285SE processors, surpasses the most recent IBM POWER5+-based p5 520 result by over 34% on the medium size set. -- World Record among all 2-socket x86-compatible systems on SPECfp_rate2000 benchmark Based on the real world user applications, the floating point throughput component of SPEC CPU2000 benchmark highlights the superior performance of multi-core Sun Fire X4200 server, when compared to the single or dual-core Xeon-based HP ML570 server, by over 70% and 56% respectively. -- World Record SPEC OMPM2001 performance for all single socket systems running 2 threads The Sun Fire X2100 server, the ultimate low-cost platform for developing and running scalable compute intensive applications, demonstrates the multi-core advantage of the AMD Opteron Model 175processor and highlights the superiority of the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 11 compiler software as well as the underlying system's design. The SPECompM2001 results for the Sun Fire X2100 dual-core server scales virtually linear (1.99 times) when compared to the Sun Fire X4100 4-way server result, that was achieved at the same clock frequency. -- World Record among all 8-core x86-compatible systems on SPECfp_rate2000 test The Sun Fire V40z server, powered by the latest multi-core AMD Opteron 880 processors, demonstrates linear scalability with the processor frequency, for the floating point throughput component of the compute-intensive SPEC CPU2000 benchmark, surpassing the record previously held by HP by over 6%. More information on the Sun x64 server and workstation benchmarks, including results for Sun's widely acclaimed Sun Fire X2100, Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers can be found at its Web site. Sun Delivers Advanced Tools for HPC and Terascale Clusters Sun recently announced several new tools and solutions that further accelerate its position and momentum in the HPC market: -- Sun customers can now build and order large-scale computing solutions from Sun by the TeraFLOP through its "TeraFLOP to Go" solution, which gives customers a low-risk method to easily build or expand compute clusters by providing innovative, HPC-ready building blocks. The "TeraFLOP to Go" solution is pre-defined and tested to scale from .25 to 2.0 TeraFLOPS, with larger configurations available upon request. Sun will build, test and deliver the ready-to-deploy system to the customer using the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program. For more information on the "TeraFLOP to Go" program, please visit its Web site. -- Sun unveiled a sneak-peek and customer early access to the Sun HPC ClusterTools 6 software, a major update to its ClusterTools portfolio. This powerful software solution enables customers to build and deploy large-scale Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications on the entire range of Sun Fire servers, powered by either x64 or SPARC-based processors running the Solaris 10 OS. -- Sun has significantly expanded its portfolio of HPC information management solutions with the acquisition of StorageTek, and is now uniquely positioned to help enterprises efficiently manage the complexities of data management that are driven by increased compute power. The UltraSPARC IV+ servers are ideal for HPC applications that require large-scale shared memory to run effectively. SPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers running on the Solaris OS are up to twice as fast as competitive solutions and offer extensive compute, input/output and storage capacity with the lowest power consumption on the market. This expanded Sun portfolio provides customers with added scalability, flexibility and choice in storage and data management with solutions for heterogeneous HPC environments. On display at Supercomputing will be the newly announced T10000 tape drive that offers the highest throughput of any tape drive available today and initial capacity of 500 GB of uncompressed data. Additionally, the industry-leading FlexLine 380 enterprise disk storage system is supporting three different HPC applications at the show with both Fibre Channel and InfiniBand connected storage -- highlighting the commitment to emerging technologies in this space. Sun and its Alliances Paving the Way to Build the Next Generation of Supercomputers Sun's powerful and strategic alliances with HPC industry leaders are key to its efforts in designing a productive Petascale system with massive compute bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Sun announced today that it has selected Luxtera Inc., a fabless semiconductor company and world leader in silicon photonics, to collaborate on the development of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical links. Luxtera's DWDM-on-a-chip technology will serve as the building block of future Terabit links in Hero, Sun's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project, part of the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program. Sun and Luxtera are demonstrating the world's first DWDM 40 Gigabit per second optical link built entirely in CMOS in the HPCS section of Sun's booth (#1416). Pursuing further breakthroughs in productivity, Sun is also leading the development of Fortress, a next-generation programming language, to achieve highly productive development and run-time environments on ultrascale systems. Dr. Guy Steele, Sun fellow, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, will deliver an "Introduction to Fortress" seminar on Nov. 15 at 3 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom A of the Sheraton Seattle Hotel (across the street from the Seattle Convention Center).