The Sun Blade Blog

In our recent launch for the Sun Blade 6000, we mentioned a new HPC blades system we plan to formally introduce later this year. This week, at the International Supercomputing show in Dresden, we will "preview" the Sun Constellation System.

The Sun Constellation System is an open systems Petascale computing environment that packages ultra-dense high performance computing, networking, storage and software in an integrated system - and yields massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics. This single, integrated system features the unibody blade chassis we showed at the launch, a massively scalable InfiniBand fabric, a Sun Fire X4500 based storage fabric and a complete software infrastructure - including OS (Solaris, Linux) and integrated management and development tools and grid engine infrastructure.

We're excited to bring open systems focus to a traditionally custom and proprietary market, delivering a system optimized across the board to deliver performance of up to 1.7 PetaFLOPS. (Compare this to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a Sun customer, which is currently building out what will be potentially the world's most powerful supercomputer when it's completed, at 500 TeraFLOPS!)

A key differentiator for the architecture is how we optimized for scale allowing us to remove additional interfaces and packaging to radically improve efficiency, reduce complexity and super-charge performance. For example, instead of multiple systems or chassis in a rack, we've created a fully integrated rack-chassis, in the unibody design. We achieve a 20% improvement in system density just by removing this level of packaging.

Similarly, by aggregating 3000+ ports in a single ultra-dense networking switch, we eliminate the layer of inter-switch communications required by multiple switches. This aggregated port design leads to improved latency (approximately one-third the latency of any other system currently on the market). Racks of integrated award-winning Sun Fire x4500 servers running Solaris and ZFS deliver unparalleled capacity and performance at 480 Terabytes of storage per rack.

We are previewing this HPC-tuned Sun Constellation System now because customers who are building at this PetaFLOP scale want to plan, design and budget as soon as possible for the systems they will deploy 6-12 months in the future.