Sun can deliver complete HPC clusters for small- and mid-sized organizations, offering an end-to-end HPC architecture that is designed to grow from a single rack up to tera- and peta-scale deployments. In a white paper entitled "Building HPC Systems for Business-critical Workloads," readers can learn about the Sun Rapid Solutions Sun Compute Cluster that provides easy-to-deploy clusters, with a choice of components including compute, storage, network, software and services.

The Sun Compute Cluster is a balanced cluster consisting of either rackmount or blade servers, with networking, interconnects and software. Specifically, it provides an integrated HPC system with Sun x64 servers, high-performance networking options and grid-ready management and resourcing software. All supported by Sun services, the entire system, including both hardware and software, can be assembled through the Sun Customer Ready program, including the racking, stacking and cabling tasks. Sun will recommend express configurations for specific workloads as well as reference configurations based on best practices.

This overview of the Sun Compute Cluster covers:

• The Building Blocks: choice of four tested base hardware and software configurations, compute nodes of either rackmount or blade modules, compute network of either InfiniBand or GbE, preconfigured rack of servers for each base configuration. This infrastructure scales from one to eight racks, with each rack built from the same base configuration.

• Compute Nodes: Off-the-shelf Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers offer 1U, 2U and 4U with up to 128 GB of memory in some 1U configurations. Sun rackmount and blade servers offer customers the choice of Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron and UltraSPARC processors. Sun Compute Cluster can scale to eight racks for up to 256 compute nodes with 32 rackmount or 30 blade servers offered per rack. See ranges of Sun servers with varying processors suitable for HPC infrastructure in the paper.

• Networking: Ethernet switches are stackable up to eight switches, providing a total of 384 ports. The 24-port InfiniBand switches are connected in a two-tier CLOS, or fat-tree, topology.

• Software: Sun xVM Ops Center, Sun Grid Engine, Sun Studio, Sun HPC ClusterTools, Base configurations run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10, Solaris or OpenSolaris

Sun HPC Open Storage solutions also are outlined, with flash-based, network, parallel and archive storage discussed. The prescribed and recommended services are highlighted as well.

In conclusion, the paper cites IDC's reporting that "Sun is one of the few system vendors with the potential to address nearly the entire HPC market. And Sun is one of only a handful of vendors with the scale and experience to tackle the range of complex issues faced by HPC users in all organization sizes and market sectors."

More Information

Building HPC Systems for Business-critical Workloads - white paper

Sun Rapid Solutions - designed to help customers cut costs and increase datacenter efficiency

New Open Storage Solutions Establish Sun As HPC Storage Leader

Sun Rapid Solutions Product Page

Sun Compute Cluster Product Page [...read more...]

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