SunConstellationSystem: Sun Constellation System news

Although not thought of as a typical HPC  environment, the rendering of images for movies is very compute intensive. By now, many of you have seen the movie, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs w. It was rendered on Sun hardware, specifically the X6250. Read more about how Blue Sky Studios choose Sun to solve their large computing requirements. Read Here.

Sun Announced New QDR Infiniband Switch

The Sun lineup of Infiniband networking products continues to expand. To see the full lineup, click here.  We have recently introduced a new products, the Sun Datacenter Infiniband Switch 72.

The 1RU Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 is a complete, ultra-slim, ultra-dense switch fabric solution for Sun server clusters up to 72 Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand (IB) nodes.  Most importantly, the switch integrates with the Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand QDR Switched Network Express Module, scaling up to over 576 end nodes. This makes it easier to completely assemble a high performance computing system, with compute, networking and storage, all from the same vendor.

Register for the upcoming Sun HPC Consortium, held the 2 days before SC 2009. We are developing the agenda, but be assured there will be a number of exciting customer talks on their experience with the Sun Constellation System, and general updates on Sun's HPC products. Register early and save.  See you there. 

Greetings again from Sun Microsystems,

You are invited to the following HPC community online event.

On Thursday, Sept. 17, Sun will be sponsoring a Virtual Conference for HPC.   This is a great opportunity for you from the HPC community to learn and experience the latest about Sun's HPC Solutions and Industries.  Below is the website to register and read more about the important details: agenda, speakers and sponsors...

http://www.hpcvirtualevent.com/index.html

From the website, you can see that there will be many exhibits: some that are Sun technology and sponsor focused, others that are a specific HPC industry focused.

Also, please forward this invitation to your colleagues interested in expanding their HPC as well as Cloud Computing knowledge and finding innovative solutions to support their HPC initiatives with more productive research tools.

Sun is hosting the only virtual conference dedicated to the best in high performance computing. This online event will give you an opportunity to hear from industry experts representing Intel, Univa, Sun (including Andy Bechtolsheim's visionary talk on industry trends and Sun's innovative current and upcoming technologies followed by Marc Hamilton's talk on HPC Cloud Computing), Clemson University, and the Council for Competitiveness discussing the trends and issues facing the computational ecosystem.

    WHAT: HPC Virtual Conference Event
    DATE: Thursday, September 17, 2009
    TIME: 8:00am - 3:00pm  PT /  9:00am - 4:00pm MT / 10:00am - 5:00pm CT
        (3:00pm - 10:00pm GMT)
    REGISTRATION SITE: http://www.hpcvirtualevent.com/index.html

Featured presenters from Sun, Intel, Univa UD, Clemson University, and the Council for Competitiveness
include the following:

    * Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems
    * Marc Hamilton, Sun Microsystems
    * David Padghem,  Council for Competitiveness, Policy Director for the HPC Initiative
    * Wes Shimanek, Strategic Marketing Manager, Technical Computing, Intel Corporation
    * Dr. Nash Palaniswamy, Senior Manager, Throughput Computing, Intel Corporation
    * Gary Tyreman, Vice President and General Manager,  Univa UD
    * Dr. James Leylek, Clemson University

Marc Hamilton, Sun's VP of HPC sales (blog here) attended the opening of the Centre For High Performance Computing in South Africa.  Marc has more detail in his blog, so please read it. Here are two images from the Centre For High Performance Computing.

A new whitepaper, "Extreme Scalability Using Sun Grid Engine Software" has been posted to the web. This whitepaper discusses some of the best practices when using at distributed resource manager (DRM) for running very large scale clusters when thousands and thousands of jobs will be submitted to thousands of cores.  Download the whitepaper - "Extreme Scalability Using Sun Grid Engine Software".

Sun recently announced a new compute server, based on the Intel Nehalem processor. This is a new version of the popular Sun Blade  X6275, which contains a total of 4 Intel Nehalem processors, but without the on board Infiniband (IB) chip. Thus, you get terrific CPU performance, for those applications that do not need on board IB.  This new X6275 product is designed to fit in the Sun Blade 6000 Chasis.

 For more information visit the X6275 web site.

Iowa State University installed a Sun HPC system, that is over 21 Tflops. 

Read about it  here.

HPC Virtual Conference: September 17, 2009

Lots of Sun Constellation System information.

SAVE THE DATE

HPC Virtual Conference
September 17, 2009
8:00 AM Pacific
11:00 AM Eastern
3:00 PM GMT

High Performance Computing (HPC) is business ready. HPC can give your organization a competitive advantage through shorter development cycles, better decision making and lower costs.

Join us for the only virtual conference dedicated to the best in high performance computing. The online event will give you an opportunity to hear from compute and HPC guru Andy Bechtolsheim and industry experts discussing the trends and issues facing the computational ecosystem. There will also be industry and technology exhibits offering virtual opportunities to discuss technologies, accomplishments, and collaborations in HPC, networking, storage, software, and data management.

Save the date. Register today!

For questions or more information about this message email HPCVirtualEvent@sun.com

Sun is working with Emerson to create more energy efficient data centers. Today, Sun announced with Emerson a global sales alliance. Please read at: 

Emerson and Sun Announce Global Sales Alliance; Design Energy-Efficient Next-Generation Datacenter Solution for Sandia National Laboratories.

Sun provides two types of cooling doors, which attach directly to the Sun Blade 6048 Chassis

Sun Cooling Door 5600                                            Sun Cooling Door 5200

I thought I'd point out some of the other blogs on blogs.sun.com that have HPC information in them. Take a look when you have the chance.

The HPC Watercooloer

DanT's GridBlog

The Navel of Narcissus

BestPerf 

BMSeer 

For HPC ISV's 

The Human Genome Center at the Institute for Medical Science at the University of Tokyo  receives it Sun Constellation System plaque.

Today, Sun announced the availability of the newest version of the Sun Blade X6440. This compute powerhouse, contains 4 of the AMD "Istanbul" 6 core processors. With 4 of these placed on the X6440 blade, that is 24 cores per blade, and 1152 cores in a 6048 chasis. The page for the details on the Sun Blade X6440 is here.

The press release can be found here.

The Sun Blade X6440

The Sun Datacenter Infiniband Switch 648 in action at the Juelich Supercomputer Center . Notice the cable arms that keep the IB cables well organized and reduces chances of the cables falling out of the ports. A small, but important issue.