Wondering what relevance Solaris and Sun's SPARC and CMT technology has in HPC? Do you care about security with HPC?
Read HPC Wire's latest news piece and learn how Canada's High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) is using Solaris, SPARC and CMT to provide computational services for a fairly traditional set
of HPC applications, including everything from biomedical research to
computational fluid dynamics in a super secure environment.
HPC Wire reports, "The HPCVL has a cluster of 8 Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers, each with 64 quad-core 2.52 GHz Sparc64 VII processors supporting two hardware threads per core, for compute intensive jobs with large memory requirements. There is also a cluster of 7 Sun Fire 25000 servers, each of which has 72 dual-core UltraSPARC-IV+ processors, aimed at a similar (but perhaps less demanding) workload. HPCVL's Victoria Falls cluster is built from 73 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers, each of which has two UltraSparc T2 chips with 8 cores apiece, each supporting 8 hardware threads. At full capacity this cluster can support just over 9,300 threads, and the system provides a throughput compute platform for HPCVL's users. All of the systems use Sun's Grid Engine workload management tool, and run Solaris."
The HPCVL's Web page calls it "one of Canada's leading secure HPC environments".
Full article can be found here: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Canadian-HPC-Lab-Maintains-Warm-Relationship-with-Sun-39811502.html
