High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) in Canada has selected Sun infrastructure to power Victoria Falls, its new compute cluster based on 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers and the Solaris 10 OS. Running at full capacity, the Sun-powered Victoria Falls HPC cluster is designed to process nearly 10,000 threads simultaneously.

HPCVL is a $160 million public/private collaboration for research and innovation. In addition to reliable, secure computing, HPCVL provides storage resources and support for over 130 Canadian research groups, comprising some 600 researchers, working in a variety of fields.

"As a long time customer of Sun for HPC expertise and solutions, it was natural for us to look to Sun's latest technology to keep up with the growing demands from our increasing user and application base," said, Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, HPCVL. "With the type of growth we are seeing we needed to look at the best HPC platform out there and be able to introduce new technologies. The CMT technology built into the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server has enabled us to help some of our 600+ researchers begin to use the new multi-threaded, multi-core technologies and prepare to scale rapidly to support the massive workload on the servers. We are seeing scaling even better than expected as we continue to see application demand increase."

HPC codes well suited for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 include applications that require high levels of parallelization and/or very high memory bandwidth. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server with its chip multi-threading technology delivers the performance and scalability for customers to consolidate HPC, Web and datacenter applications into an ultra-dense, energy efficient compute environment - making it ideal for the build-out of a scalable computing infrastructure such as the one in place at HPCVL.

The new compute cluster greatly expands HPCVL's compute capacity and helps meet the growing needs of its user base while continuing to deliver a highly available and secure user experience at a cost lower than competitive systems, Sun reports.

HPCVL's users have also been able to quickly identify which user applications perform best on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and optimize their code for the CMT architecture with Sun\'s CoolTools suite of tools.

For a look into Sun's current HPC portfolio please visit: http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/index.jsp [...read more...]

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