SUNW: Sun Paves Path to Petaflops with HPC Solutions and Services

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced a portfolio of new service packages and high performance computing (HPC) technologies that will help customers accelerate time to productivity, fast deployment and production-ready HPC. The new solutions and services build out Sun's HPC portfolio with innovative technologies, in addition to introducing new services that go beyond the traditional HPC approach to help customers address key challenges in their datacenters.


Comprising its innovations in software, servers, storage and services - and leveraging its key partnerships through the Sun Partner Community for HPC - Sun helps customers quickly and easily deploy leading-edge technologies and services that are packaged and delivered in a simple, low-risk manner. Sun is the only industry player that can offer an array of choices and provide a total HPC solution based on innovative technologies, combining the benefits of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet, with Sun hardware. The Solaris 10 OS is an ideal foundation for the grid infrastructure, providing exceptional performance, security and reliability for virtually any hardware platform.

"Sun is paving the fastest path to petaflops with the solutions and services we are announcing today, reaffirming our commitment to production-ready HPC," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. "The new Sun HPC Quick Start Services allow Sun customers to more easily and quickly architect, implement and manage their HPC datacenters. Our systems, storage and software solutions are backed by decades of technology innovation and systems expertise. And unlike many competitive HPC solutions, Sun's HPC portfolio has a completely open approach throughout every solution, building on our leadership in the open environment. Openness is in our DNA."

Sun also announced that the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC), located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is installing a Sun system powered by more than 250 Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers, more than 50 Sun Fire X4600 servers and six Sun Fire X4500 servers.

"The leading-edge price performance of Sun technology was a critical factor in our decision to deploy a Sun-based supercomputer at ARSC," said Frank Williams, director, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. "We now have twice the processing power and significantly more memory per core to offer our users."

Sun's new HPC technologies and services announced today include:

• Sun Blade 8000 P modular system: The first blade server specialized for high-end x64 cluster & grid computing, the Sun Blade 8000 P system is ideal for high performance clusters with triple the density of today's rackmount systems, supporting up to 240 cores, and surpassing 1.2 TeraFLOPS in a single rack. For more information, visit: http://www.sun.com/8000p


• Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation: The industry's fastest x64 workstation provides an ideal platform for developing HPC applications, runs Sun N1 Grid tools and is a very strong visualization performer. The new workstation is powered by Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors, has faster double data rate (DDR2) memory and offers an improved I/O infrastructure. For more information, visit http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra40/. Leading the x86 segment overall and surpassing competing workstations in performance and price/performance, the cutting-edge Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation has set four new world record benchmarks. The complete list of 130+ record-breaking performance results achieved by Sun's x64 platforms can be found at: http://www.sun.com/x64/benchmarks/
  


• Sun HPC Quick Start Services: Comprehensive suite of services to help customers architect, implement and manage their HPC environment through faster deployment, improved performance, reduced risk and lower cost. These services are designed to work together, and build on Sun's strategy for maximizing IT value by extending its Sun System Packs to address customer- and industry-specific HPC requirements. For more information, visit: http://www.sun.com/service/hpc
  


• Sun System Packs: Sun System Packs for the new Sun Blade 8000 P modular system combine servers, storage and software with the right services for the right price, and accelerate the maximum value of IT investments. For more information, visit http://www.sun.com/systempacks
  


• Sun Visualization System for HPC: A preview of the open and scalable, fully integrated and customizable solution based on Sun's workstations and servers. The Sun Visualization System for HPC helps customers quickly view and analyze large amounts of complex data, create and dynamically manage highly scalable visualization resources and make them more accessible across their environment. For more information, visit: http://www.sun.com/hpc/visualization
  


• Three new modules for the Grid Engine Open Source Project: Continuing its open source heritage, Sun is making a key contribution to advancing open source technologies for HPC by releasing new modules from the Sun N1 Grid Engine price-listed product to the Grid Engine Open Source Project. For more information, visit: http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/ and http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
  


• Storage solution for large HPC/Grid clusters: The new Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage features the Sun Fire X4500 server -- the world's first hybrid data server. By collaborating with Cluster File Systems, Inc. to deploy the Lustre file system, a leading scalable, secure, highly available cluster file system, the Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage is a solution based on experience from successful implementations in some of the world's largest computing environments. The Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage also includes Voltaire InfiniBand fabrics, as the result of an agreement announced today that integrates Voltaire's InfiniBand and multi-service director-class switches, host channel adapters and software into Sun's portfolio of HPC technologies. For more information, visit: http://www.sun.com/sgrs
  


• Sun expands support for HPC developers with Sun Studio Express: A preview version of the next Sun Studio software release with its parallelizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers and tools for both Solaris and Linux platforms. Sun Studio Express offers enhanced performance analysis and OpenMP functionality as well as new thread analysis tools, which help developers identify common multi-thread error conditions. Developers can download free, unrestricted copies of Sun Studio Express and Sun Studio 11 at: http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio
  


• Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 Early Access Program: Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 supports InfiniBand and is based on Open MPI, an open source implementation of MPI. As with previous versions, Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 software offers a comprehensive set of tools for parallel program development, resource management, system administration and cluster administration and is available for download now at: http://www.sun.com/software/products/clustertools/ct7.html
  


• Sun Grid Compute Utility: 20 independent software vendors (ISVs) are working with Sun to host their applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility at http://www.network.com/. See related release at: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-11/sunflash.20061114.4.xml. At Supercomputing 2006, Sun will also host its second Gridathon, an interactive hands-on series of technical presentations and seminars to provide participants with information on how to port, architect, and deploy applications in a grid environment. Sun will also offer an online version of the Sun Gridathon. More information is available at: http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/gridathon/index.html
  

For more information on Sun's HPC offerings, please visit: http://www.sun.com/hpc