William Stein, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, collaborated with more than 150 mathematicians worldwide to build an open-source computational software program called Sage as a viable free open source alternative to software programs such as Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.

Interested in expanding the computational capabilities and overall performance of Sage, Stein knew the hardware used by the Department of Mathematics needed an upgrade.

"We were using a custom-built high-end server built by a local company, which was not nearly as powerful as what we needed," says Stein. "We had some uptime issues with our hardware. Also, in terms of space, we share server space with the entire mathematics department, and we were pushing the limits of how much space we were using for our servers."

Researching server solutions from Dell to IBM to locals, the university decided on four Sun Fire X4450 servers, powered by 2.6 Ghz Six-Core Intel Xeon processors, and one Sun Fire X4540 server that runs OpenSolaris as its operating system. The X4540, which contains 24TB of disk space, is currently being used as a storage device for Sage. It provides the department with additional storage capacity in a compact device.

The Sun solution was deployed in December 2008, and the department has experienced a huge increase in computing power as well as speed in the automated testing of Sage.

"The whole way I do mathematical calculations using Sage is so much different now that I have this hardware," comments Stein. "I regularly set up computations that use the whole power of the machine at once, using parallel computing techniques, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that before." He continued, "Having a machine with so many cores makes it easy to do testing. With a single-core machine, it would take me at least one hour to run the standard Sage test suite. With the Sun X4450, it only takes three minutes, because it runs all the tests in parallel."

System stability has also improved significantly, Stein reports, and because the Sun X4450 is a space- and energy-efficient 2U size, the department can more easily address its server space limitations. "These servers are only half the height of the competition's servers, so they only take up half the space in our server room," remarks Stein.

Overall, Stein comments that Sun's deal was just the best: "The deal that Sun was able to offer us was much better than competitors' offers, and the technology itself seemed to fit our needs better."

More Information

Sun Fire X4450 Server

Sun Fire X4540 Server

Solaris 10 Operating System

SunSpectrum Support [...read more...]

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