At the Sun Open Network Systems launch, the company introduced servers, integrated open storage, and high-performance networking designed for the HPC market as well as other customers wanting to take advantage of high performance technology capabilities that address high performance, high throughput, large memory and fast I/O.

Sun reports that with these new HPC systems, customers can simplify their environment from less highly integrated solutions -- reducing cabling by 84 percent, switches by 97 percent, and rack space by 75 percent.

"Slow pipes and slow storage have limited high performance computing systems for years. The solution is to evolve the industry's view of high performance computing today to include high performance I/O and networking," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Our Open Network Systems approach first solved this problem with the Sun Constellation System. Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges."

Sun's scalable new HPC systems and related technologies include:

Next-generation Sun Constellation System

With more than two PetaFLOPS of performance already installed or ordered, the new Sun Constellation System is expected to power some of the largest HPC systems in the world, including Australian National University (ANU), Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), the Galileu Project and the University of Zurich.

Dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server module powered by Intel Xeon processor 5500 series

First blade server to support onboard IB QDR for extreme network performance, power efficiency and ease of use. Each Sun Blade X6275 server module has two full-function compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, up to 96GB of high-speed memory, integrated QDR IB Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and Gigabit Ethernet, optional Sun Flash Modules, and optional PCIe ExpressModule I/O. The configurability of the system ensures that the same blades can run compute-intensive, memory-intensive, communication-intensive or I/O-intensive applications, so customers can address nearly all of their HPC workloads with a single cluster system from Sun.

Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) Network Express Module (NEM)

Offers integrated switching functionality for QDR IB networks directly within the Sun Blade 6048 chassis. Each node on a Sun Blade X6275 server module offers onboard QDR IB HCAs that interface directly with the integrated Sun Blade 6048 IB QDR Switched NEMs in the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, and the Sun Blade 6048 IB QDR Switched NEMs directly connect to Sun Datacenter IB switches in high-bandwidth fat-tree topologies or to other Sun Blade 6048 IB QDR Switched NEMs in low-cost 3D torus configurations.

Sun Blade 6048 chassis

The Sun Blade 6048 chassis along with the Sun Blade X6275 server module provides extreme density with 48 physical blades per rack -- supporting 96 nodes of two-socket, quad-core processors per node, resulting in a total of 768 processor cores and nine teraFLOPS of peak performance in a single 42U rack. With 2.25 teraFLOPS of peak compute capacity and Linpack efficiency of 89 percent per every shelf of 12 blades, customers can expect up to two teraFLOPS of actual computational power. Moreover, for communication-intensive applications that rely on high-speed IB interconnect to perform tasks -- such as weather modeling and forecasting, high energy and nuclear physics, molecular dynamics calculations and seismic processing -- customers can expect up to 92 percent efficiency from a single shelf of the Sun Blade 6048 chassis.

Sun Cooling Door system

Offers six times more efficient rack cooling than standard datacenter cooling systems to significantly reduce energy consumption and increase effective compute density by up to 70 percent over in-row cooling options, says Sun. Designed with up to 35kW per rack, the Sun Cooling Door system fits in the rear of the updated Sun Blade 6048 modular system. Sun declares that the Sun Cooling Door system has the highest cooling efficiency and capacity in a 100 percent passive design that does not require additional fans or electrical power to function. Available as either the Sun Cooling Door 5200, which leverages existing chilled-water infrastructure, or the Sun Cooling Door 5600, which utilizes eco-friendly refrigerant gas, these advanced cooling systems remove heat at the source, require minimal datacenter footprint and can help avoid costly datacenter makeovers.

Lustre File System and Sun's Open Storage portfolio

The Sun Lustre Storage System is a complete Lustre and Open Storage hardware solution enabling customers to scale online capacity from 48 terabytes to multiple petabytes and scale I/O performance from 1 GB per second to more than 100 GB per second. The Sun Lustre Storage System simplifies the deployment of Lustre-based solutions with pre-defined metadata server and object storage server configurations that offer high-performance, high-availability and cost efficiency. In addition, standard configuration and delivery makes the solution fast to deploy and easy to manage, and available support options help optimize uptime and performance.

Networking Solutions

HPC networking solutions designed to help maximize performance with an integrated signaling and switching approach that uses the latest available technology to optimize per-node performance and system-wide scaling for application communications and I/O.

Other new networking products Sun announced include:

• Sun InfiniBand Dual Port 4x QDR PCIe ExpressModule Host Channel Adaptor (HCA): Delivering additional QDR IB connectivity to Sun's Blade Server Modules, the QDR IB PCIe ExpressModule HCA enables "multi-rail" cluster deployments, provisioning each server node with multiple independent IB fabric connections supporting the most network intensive cluster workloads.

• Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized Multi Fabric 10GbE NEM: Offers 20:1 reduced cabling that simplifies Sun Blade 6000 deployment and removes interoperability issues and decreases management costs.

• Project M9: This future addition to its Sun Datacenter Switch family is expected to double the IB capability of Sun HPC solutions with unparalleled scalability and simplified cable management, Sun asserts.

More Information

Sun\'s Open Network Systems launch

Sun Constellation System and HPC solutions for clusters, storage and archive

Sun\'s HPC networking solutions

Sun Lustre Storage System

Sun Constellation System

Sun Cooling Door System [...read more...]

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