Thursday Nov 15, 2007

On 11/12/07, Sun announced new systems designed to address the extreme computation, scale, and storage requirements of high-performance computing (HPC) customers. Sun Vice President of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, invites Solaris Engineering's distinguished engineer, Josh Simons, to this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to double click on the benefits and rationale behind these innovative new technologies. Stern and Simons discuss:

  • Sun's Constellation System, the world's first open HPC architecture capable of scaling from departmental clusters all the way up to the largest supercomputer in the world.
  • A set of components that allow customers to build petascale systems at the high end of the HPC market and, taking those same capabilities, scale them downwards.
  • Support for SPARC, Intel, and AMD processors
  • A shift from big iron to a clustered approach
  • Infiniband as the technology of choice for high-bandwidth, low-latency solutions
  • Addressing customer pain points at large scale including power, switch complexity, cable complexity, fatter nodes, and driving down node count
  • How this design point of modular computing becomes a prototype for building future datacenters
  • Appealing to a wide variety of developers
  • Getting software to scale to appropriate levels for system management, programming, etc.
  • The importance of storage in HPC
  • Why Sun is hitting HPC with a vengeance
  • The rationale of pushing Solaris if the vast majority of the HPC market is Linux-focused.

    Links:



    Transcript
    Sun Constellation System
    HPC Portal



    • Posted at 11:11AM Nov 15, 2007 by Laura Ventura in Sun   [permalink]    

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