A recent Sun Innovation Insider podcast features Tony Warner, HPC Initiative Marketing Manager and Rich Brueckner, Community Manager for HPC Systems at Sun Microsystems

Through Sun, High-Performance Computing (HPC) expands to mainstream small and large businesses, no longer limited to the "large mainframe device" image.

"The definition I tend to use," said Tony Warner, "is that high-performance computing is all about the use of a focused resource system to solve a computational problem."

Sun’s HPC components are being standardized and scaled down through clustering to make this technology more readily available. Businesses are using HPC everyday for a variety of reasons to improve their position in the marketplace. The barriers for market entry for smaller businesses are changing due to HPC technology. HPC systems may be built by Sun or businesses can build their own.

Businesses are using HPC technology to create to gain a competitive edge, to solve complex problems, to produce a better product, to complete complex tasks, and to save money. A misconception is that HPC may only be used only to solve big problems; however, it is being used in original ways, for example: the design of swimsuits that give you speed, golf clubs that give you a longer swing, or for supply chain management of merchandise purchased.

With Sun, the deployment of an HPC installation is easier as well as the maintenance and software management. Sun Grid Engine software provides policy-based workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workloads. For example, a data center can balance their books while waiting on a credit card transaction, or maximize the test simulations to produce better safety features.

Sun’s HPC efforts indicate performance but also simplicity and flexibility. The HPC trend is for smaller companies who are being outsourced by larger companies to deliver specific products. Sun’s Constellation system can be scaled down to a departmental level using the same architecture. This translates into the architecture that meets the needs of an ordinary customer on a smaller scale. The Sun Constellation System is the world's first open Petascale computing environment combining ultra-dense high performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics. The Sun Constellation System brings key innovations to market and is designed for radical simplicity that puts a new level of HPC within reach for customers.

HPC components can built easily by customers with the advent of clustering technologies. Businesses are moving away from the proprietary built HPC for a task to industry standard components. Sun offers a complete range of systems that address HPC needs including x64 and SPARC Servers. The Sun Customer Ready HPC Cluster gives businesses a ready-to-deploy, factory-integrated cluster with record-breaking Sun Fire servers, plus networking and interconnect options and grid-ready software.

Storage is a critical component to any HPC installation. Some businesses need a large volume of disk space and use a software, such as Sun’s Lustre file system to access and manage large amounts of data. Designed to meet the demands of the HPC clusters, the Lustre file system redefines scalability and provides groundbreaking I/O and metadata throughput.

More Information

Podcast: HPC and Business Innovation

High Performance Computing

Sun Constellation System

HPC Community Portal [...read more...]

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