Sun is using their vast experience in building supercomputing clusters to create High Performance Computing (HPC) guidelines for its customers. HPC infrastructure is complex and configurations can be difficult to scale if not done properly. The Sun BluePrint "Sun's High Performance Computing Reference Architecture" is designed to attend to these challenges. With their HPC Reference Architecture, Sun provides an integrated end-to-end approach. Sun has launched large superclusters and is sharing their experience with this BluePrint.

"Sun’s HPC Reference Architecture addresses a broad range of individual HPC solutions, from single-rack clusters though terascale and petascale supercomputing clusters," according to this BluePrint authors (Kling-Petersen, Lindh and Torudbakken).

About HPC

HPC is becoming more popular and is being used by several different industries. IT managers are familiarizing with the HPC system make up and realizing along with upper management its importance and strategic advantages. "Insight into the strategic and competitive advantages offered by HPC infrastructure can and will change how companies do business and address their core missions," said Kling-Petersen, Lindh and Torudbakken.

Contents

• Introduction

• Sun’s HPC Reference Architecture
• Improved efficiency through HPC
• Ubiquitous clustering technology
• Sun’s end-to-end architecture for HPC
• Proven reference designs for HPC

• Compute Systems
• General requirements
• x86/x64 servers for HPC
• Chip multithreaded (CMT) SPARC® systems for HPC

• Interconnects and High-Performance Networks
• Ethernet
• InfiniBand
• Sun Datacenter Switches for InfiniBand infrastructure

• File Systems and Archive Solutions for HPC
• Network File System (NFS)
• Lustre parallel file system
• Sun Storage Cluster and the Lustre parallel file system
• Solari ZFS and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems
• Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC

• Visualization
• The Sun Visualization System
• Sun Shared Visualization software
• Sun Scalable Visualization

• HPC Software, Resource Management, and System Management
• Suns HPC Software for Linux and the Solaris OS
• Resource management with Sun Grid Engine software
• System management

• Summary

About the Authors

• Torben Kling: Petersen Senior Technical Specialist
• Borje Lindh: Senior Systems Engineer
• Ola Torudbakken: Distinguished Engineer

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