Barely a year in the public eye, the Sun Constellation System based on petascale architecture, has already been chosen by the German Center for Computer Applications in Aerospace Science and Engineering (C²A²S²E), which is supported by Airbus and the state of Lower Saxony. The new supercomputer, with a compute capacity of 46.6 TFlops, will carry a EUR 5.2 million price tag.
It is pretty well known that Sun xVM and Virtualization can save a remarkable amount of time and money. In a Q&A session Mike Wookey, Sun CTO and distinguished engineer of Sun xVM and Connected Systems, explains that “in areas like high performance computing, xVM is a real boon for ensuring that thousands of nodes and systems do what they’re supposed to do.”
The largest compute cluster in Latin America, spanning seven different sites, is Sao Paulo University's $3.1 million UNESP Computer Capacity Integration (GridUNESP), which will be powered by Sun technology and run on the Sun Fire X4150 Server. The central cluster of systems will have 2048 processing nuclei and a compute capacity of 23.2 TFlops. The complete system will total 33.32 TFlops.
Sun has signed a $34 million contract with China Mobile Communications Corporation to deliver IT products and services during 2008. It is expected that Sun's Eco Innovation solutions will enable the IT infrastructure to increase operational efficiency by 85%, doubling real estate savings and reducing energy costs by half. The agreement will help China Mobile release new value-added services that will enhance its core competitiveness and reveal new business opportunities.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes:
Scott McNealy Video to UK Entrepeneurs - June 2008
Sun, Flash Memory and Open Storage
Active Power’s PowerHouse for Sun Modular Datacenter S20
Network.com Makes BBC’s Best Cloud Apps
Discussion on Flash Memory and Sun Storage Technology
OpenSolaris Build 90 allows multiple products, protocols and device types to be supported by any Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)-based server with a common framework - COMSTAR or the COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget.
Find out how to optimize OpenSolaris on Intel Xeon processors in a video clip series hosted by Software Engineering Manager David Stewart, who is part of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 8 Early Access 2 is a pre-release version of Open MPI 1.3 with the latest bug fixes and new features including, Linux support, DTrace providers for MPI, MPI support for Mellanox ConnectX HCAs, MPI profiling with VampirTrace, MPI profiling with PERUSE and support for C++ applications built with libstlport4. This is the first release to support Linux.
In March, Sun released a public support statement that said Sun supports middleware products on a variety of virtualization technologies. A June update from Sun clarifies which Sun Java System products are supported with the following virtualization products and features :
One of the speakers at the HPC Consortium held in mid-June in Dresden, Germany, was Ken Edgecomb of Canada's High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL), whose wide-ranging address covered everything from the rationale behind the move in the industry to Chip Multithreading (CMT), to the scaling capabilities of the Sun UltraSPARC T2 HPC cluster dubbed "Victoria Falls," to the cost of threads vs. hardware (and the cost per thread in such a server as the 5140), the changing research population at HPCVL, and the announcement that next year's HPC Consortium would take place in Kingston, Ontario.
Harriet Coverston's talk on SAM-QFS at the recent Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, touched on the reasons behind the emphasis Sun is giving HPC in its overall corporate picture. She observed the tendency of developments in HPC to generalize to the wider market in time, noting as well that the major system requirements in HPC come in to play in other areas of IT as well, such as consolidated storage, performance and scalability, and parallel processing. See a video replay of this talk on the Sun Web site.
Johan De Gelas with AnandTech IT Portal wrote a review on the Sun Fire X4450. His research shows that the only 2U server on the market that features the Quad Socket Intel Xeon MP 73xx platform is the Sun Fire X4450.
Reports on the power consumption of the Sun Fire X4450 Server running VMmark from two sources show that the server's eco-efficiency comes in at an impressive level. AnandTech reports the Sun Fire X4450 delivers one of the best scores among all 16-core results.
Sun is making new standard configurations and options available for the Sun Fire X4150 Server with the Intel Xeon E5450 processor, as well as for the Intel Xeon L5420 processor options for the Sun Fire X4150, and, at the same time, the company is replacing the Intel Xeon L5335 processor. Sun is also beginning to transition the earlier standard configurations for the Sun Fire X4150.
Sun has released the second model of the Sun Fire X2200 server. These M2 servers with the new High Efficiency (HE) quad core AMD Opteron processors save power draw, running at an Average CPU Power (ACP) of just 55 Watts, while offering quad core performance enhancements. A few new features are the new quad core Sun Fire X2200 M2 HE standard configuration, ATO processor options and upgrade kit for dual core Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important.
The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 124 Issue 3, were:
Sun BluePrints: Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture [20024]
Is ZFS Right for Replication Between Your Remote Sites? [19984]
Virtualization is one approach to improving application software scalability and system utilization, report Ning Sun and Lee Anne Simmons in the Sun BluePrints Online article. With Sun's CMT platform and the Logical Domains (LDoms) virtualization technology, deploying an application in a virtualized environment resulted in better utilization of system resources and delivered as much as 10-times improvement in performance when compared to a single application instance running on the system.
MySQL is generally used by businesses that are just starting out or for smaller projects. Oracle, on the other hand, supports large OLTP environments and VLDBs. The products are said to not be comparable because they each have their own purpose depending on what the customer is trying to accomplish. In a recent blog entry George Trujillo had a feature comparison of both from a DBA perspective.
Michael Heinrichs has written a Sun Developer Network article on "Using JavaFX Script Objects in Java Programs." This process is a fairly easy one, he maintains, because JavaFX Script was designed to enable the use of Java objects and because the necessary instruments are built right into the language. He demonstrates possible ways to create JavaFX objects and to use them in Java code.
NetBeans Technical Writer Geertjian has revised his tutorial blog entries on VisualVM to incorporate the latest VisualVM APIs. He also has referenced a new set of samples and templates he finds helpful in getting started, along with information on troubleshooting each blog entry's particular scenario.
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