The Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) has purchased ten Sun FireTM servers to increase the computing power, reliability, availability and scalability of the HPCF.

The HPCF is a collaborative environment for data and numerical intensive computing privately run by the University of Cambridge and Cranfield University.

The Universities' research teams will use the servers for large-scale numerical calculations in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Brain Imaging, Bioinformatics and Economic Modeling. The computing capacity of the system will exceed 2 teraflops, which would place the Sun Cluster at Cambridge's HPCF among the top 20 supercomputers of the world, based on the recently published list of the top 500 supercomputers.

"In order to support the variety of projects being done at the HPCF, we sought out an infrastructure with reliable and flexible performance," explained Prof. Ian Drummond, director of the HPCF, Cambridge University. "The superior flexibility of the Sun Fire 15K servers combined with Sun's reputation for delivering open, scalable and reliable high-performance solutions made Sun the obvious choice to lead our continued advances in high-performance computing and e-science."

The Sun Fire 15K servers will be installed at the University of Cambridge and Cranfield University this fall. The HPCF will lead the UK's e-science initiative, a collaborative effort to develop a nationwide grid infrastructure for continued research in multiple scientific disciplines.

"As advancements in scientific research continue, universities will find themselves addressing more and more complex problems that require powerful and well-balanced computing infrastructures," said Joerg Schwarz, group manager of science and engineering at Sun.

The Sun Fire 15K server, built on the industry's most general purpose architecture, is the world's largest single cabinet UNIXR server system featuring up to 106 processors, two to four times the memory of competitive products with 576 Gigabytes, and 18 I/O hubs for networking and storage connectivity. Additionally, the Sun FireplaneTM interconnect, first introduced with the Sun Fire 15K server, provides unprecedented throughput, critical for superior performance across a wide range of applications. [...read more...]

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