When the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab installed 180 Sun FireTM X2100 servers running a Red Hat-based OS kernel, they tested them against their old Datel AMD Athlon-based server cluster and found an increase in performance by the Sun servers that saved the scientists hours of time.

The old server cluster was replaced, as Paul Henderson, the lab's head of systems and network engineering, explained to Mark Fontecchio of SearchDataCenter.com. Henderson said, "We were getting between 300 and 400 percent faster performance on our code, much more reliable hardware, and basically everybody just abandoned the old cluster and we shut it off quicker than we thought we would have to."

In addition to performance enhancements, the lab is seeing savings in cooling and power costs with the new servers in the newly redesigned lab. The redesign shifted the rows of servers so that the exhaust fans of one row was not blowing hot air onto the next row, causing problems. Humidity was also a factor that they improved upon.

The low-cost Sun Fire X2100 server can be tested for free from Sun as part of the Sun Try & Buy program. See article number [17597] for details on the server and the promotion.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is studying fusion energy and using hydrogen to produce energy. Their work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and the servers have resulted in $80,000 a year in power savings. The servers are also providing real-time data on the studies.

"The Sun hardware all works as planned and we really didn't have any surprises," Henderson said. "It was just a very smooth transition." [...read more...]

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