SYSTEMS

Demonstrating its leadership in high performance computing, Sun Microsystems today announced the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) has purchased 296 Sun Fire V20z servers for use in advanced research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Projects include initial development of a Leadership-Class Computing Facility for Data-Intensive Science and the PEP-II/BaBar program making measurements at the frontiers of physics. These AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire servers run the platinum standard for enterprise operating systems (OS) -- Solaris, as well as Linux and Microsoft Windows through Windows Hardware Qualification List (WHQL) certification. Visit SLAC at the Supercomputing 2004 booth #2149, and Sun Microsystems at booth #1207. "At SLAC we work with data-analysis clusters totaling thousands of nodes that access over a petabyte of data from hundreds of Sun data servers, so system management and system stability are important issues for us," said Richard Mount, director of SLAC computing services. "Our selection of Sun x86 systems for our newest data-analysis cluster is a further step in our continuing efforts to achieve reliability and fully functional lights out management (LOM). This approach allows us to stop focusing on the datacenter floor and focus more on the services we deploy." Currently SLAC runs over 1000 SPARC architecture-based systems and over 400TB of disk from Sun which are dedicated to SLAC physics and computer science research. The center plans to use a portion of the AMD Opteron processor-based systems to validate the use of a Large Memory System to resolve disk latency and bottlenecks, ultimately delivering a revolutionary increase in scientific productivity. Sun is also partnering with SLAC to test and deploy new features of Solaris 10, highlighting the new TCP/IP architecture to scale from the low end to the high-end. The High Energy Physics (HEP) community is in the midst of running a new round of experiments to probe the fundamental nature of matter and space-time, to help us understand the origins of the universe. These experiments require working with volumes of complex data that need collaboration among scientists around the world. Sun systems with Solaris 10 will provide a portion of this massive infrastructure. "Sun has always served high performance computing centers with our SPARC-based systems, and now that we have price/performance leading two and four way systems these traditional customers are bringing Sun into their tier 1 infrastructure," said John Fowler, executive vice president at Sun. "We are thrilled to see a prominent high performance computing facility like SLAC choosing the Sun Fire V20z systems." "Sun fosters close working relationships with the top universities and colleges worldwide and we are recognized for our systems engineering and innovation," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research. "SLAC's choice of AMD Opteron processor-based systems from Sun will keep them at the leading edge of their research field."