A new InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) switch, new Sun HPC Software Linux Edition 2.0, Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 3, and enhancements to the Lustre file system were all part of product announcements Sun made during the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference held June 23-26 in Hamburg.

Sun Datacenter InfiniBand QDR Switch 648

Delivers extreme density, performance and reduced deployment complexity with up to three times more ports per rack, four and a half times more system bandwidth, and up to 3:1 cable reduction than competitive Double Data Rate (DDR) switch solutions.

Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 2.0

Makes it faster and easier to install Linux-based environments by providing an integrated Linux software stack for HPC solutions, and gives customers a choice of running SUSE 10, CentOS and Red Hat Linux.

Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 3

Improves support for both private and public (Amazon EC2) clouds and adds monitoring of compute clusters and the Service Domain Manager (SDM) from one place.

Lustre 1.8.0

Introduces several robust new features to improve system performance and functionality, including the adaptive timeouts feature, client interoperability feature, OSS read cache feature and Version-based Recovery (VBR).

"Sun is enabling customers to take advantage of next-generation technologies to scale their HPC systems and eliminate bottlenecks so they can manage explosive data growth, rising costs and server sprawl," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun continues to improve the Sun Constellation System with open innovations to provide customers with leading-edge performance, scale and efficiency."

SUN CONSTELLATION SYSTEM

Most of these new products improve and expand the Sun Constellation System that is designed using Sun's Open Network Systems architecture. The Sun Constellation System delivers top performance on a wide range of compute-intensive, memory-intensive, communication-intensive or I/O-intensive applications, such as weather forecasting (WRF), seismic processing (Reverse Time Migration), molecular modeling (NAMD), and subatomic physics (MILC). It was able to achieve scalability efficiencies of nearly 90 percent across these workloads for performance benefits at every level. The availability of QDR IB infrastructure offers up to an 80 percent performance boost versus DDR IB on communication-intensive suites in HPCC, such as FFT and PTRANS.

Benchmarks

Sun also reported four new results on the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark for the Sun Constellation System. The SPEC benchmark is used to gauge a computer's processor, memory architecture and compilers on a variety of real-world compute intensive workloads:

• The best integer throughput score ever published
• Top x86 floating point throughput result
• World speed record on integer-intensive computations
• World speed record on floating point-intensive computations

All HPC benchmark results on Sun's Open Network Systems are available from the Sun Web site.

HPC Software Solutions

During the conference, Sun also highlighted the following Sun HPC software solutions, many of which have upgrades and are open source:

Sun Studio 12 Update 1

Contains new features and enhancements to boost performance and simplify the creation of high-performance parallel applications for the latest multicore x86 and SPARC-based systems running on leading Linux platforms, the Solaris Operating System (OS) or OpenSolaris. The Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software has set almost a dozen industry benchmark records to date, and in conjunction with the freely available community-based OpenSolaris 2009.06 OS, was instrumental in landing four new ground-breaking SPEC CPU2006 results.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.2

Provides MPI libraries and Runtime environment based on Open MPI, fully tested and supported by Sun on both Solaris and Linux. The software provides full interconnect support, including IB QDR and IB multi-rail, providing both high performance and scalability required by today's powerful HPC cluster systems.

Sun xVM Ops Center 2.1

Enhances Sun xVM Ops Center by providing key bug fixes, integrating patches, and introducing a number of functional and usability enhancements.

Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.0 and Sun QFS (SAM-QFS)

Introduces new shared file system and archive software features that ease administration and improve shared file system services and archive management.

Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris

Combines the latest Sun HPC developer software and tools with OpenSolaris in an easy to use virtual machine. [...read more...]

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