High-performance computing (HPC) initiative Petroleo Brasileiro (BR) Network was created to handle computer simulations to aid oil production in Brazil's pre-salt basin. An HPC grid was required to handle the complex project with the goal being a high-performance, affordable solution that could expand easily over the next few years. Sun, IBM, Dell, Bull, SGI, and HP were consulted. After an extensive review process, the group decided that Sun would best meet its goals for performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and cost, the latter of which was 30% less than an offering from the closest competing vendor.

CLUMEQ is a supercomputing consortium of universities in the province of Quebec, Canada. It includes McGill University, Universite Laval, and all nine components of the Universite du Quebec network. CLUMEQ supports scientific research in disciplines such as climate and ecosystems modeling, high energy particle physics, cosmology, nanomaterials, supramolecular modeling, bioinformatics, biophotonics, fluid dynamics, data mining and intelligent systems. Sun is providing the technology for this HPC implementation.

The latest Top500 list published in November shows three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems. Sun also doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Additionally, Sun announced new products and technologies for high performance computing (HPC), an upgrade to the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, new HPC benchmarks and new HPC customers.