Sun Constellation System - Core Component
One of the most advanced technologies that is at the core (no pun intended) of the Sun Constellation System is the Sun Blade X6275. This blade, which can only be installed in the 6048 chassis, contains 2 independent blades, packaged as one. Sometimes referred as 2x2, the X6275 contains 2 identical blades, each with 2 sockets of the Intel 5500 series processor. Each of the Intel processors actually has 4 cores per chip. Thus, the X6275 has 16 cores on the single physical blade. Put this into a 6048 chassis, and a whopping 768 cores are available for HPC applications.
Another very advanced feature of the X6275 blade is that there are 2 Infiniband QDR chips on the blade, 1 for each compute node. This allows for very fast communication with other blades for applications that run across physical blades. This is one of the first blade server with on-board QDR InfiniBand for high
performance and low latency (up to 64 Gb/sec bi-directional bandwidth -
per compute node). In addition, the X6275 supports Sun Flash Modules for storage acceleration and a reliable, low power boot device. Take a look. You will be surprised as all of the HPC related technology on a single blade.
We are also seeing more 6048 Constellation benchmarks, for instance:
HPC Benchmark:
Sun Blade 6048 and Sun Blade X6275 NAMD Molecular Dynamics Benchmark beats IBM BlueGene/L
http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/sun_blade_6048_and_sun
New CPU2006 Records: 3x better integer throughput, 9x better fp throughput
On the SPECint_rate_base2006 benchmark, Sun delivered 4.7 times more performance than the IBM power 595 (5GHz POWER6); this IBM system requires a slightly larger cabinet than the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, details at the link.
http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/new_cpu2006_records_3x_better
Disclosure Statement:
SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 6/22/2009 and this report. Sun Blade 6048 chassis with Sun Blade X6440 server modules (48 nodes with 4 chips, 16 cores, 16 threads each, OpenSolaris 2008.11, Studio 12 update 1) - 8840 SPECint_rate_base2006, 6500 SPECfp_rate_base2006; IBM p595, 1870 SPECint_rate_base2006, 1681 SPECfp_rate_base2006.
Posted by BC on July 01, 2009 at 09:25 AM PDT #