Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Today, Red Sky, Sandia's Sun Constellation Supercomputer was announced as the 10th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 TFlops. In the time-lapse video below, you can watch the building of Red Sky at Sandia National Laboratories National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Red Sky uses Sun's new 5600 Cooling Door System to achieve new levels of energy efficiency for a system of this size. By Sandia's own calculations, besides energy efficiency, the cooling door system saves over 5 million gallons a year of water compared to traditional air-cooled systems. Now that is green IT!

The latest Top500 list was published today and three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems.

Sandia National Labs Red Sky supercomputer becomes a new system on the Top 10, entering the list at number 10 and edging out last June's number 10 entry the Juelich Juropa supercomputer which moves to 13th position on the Top500. KISTI's Tachyonll supercomputer enters the Top500 list at position 14. Quite amazing for its staying power on the Top500 and testimony to the TACC's Ranger supercomputer, which first appeared on the Top500 list in June 2008 at position 5 finds itself at postion 9 on the current Top500 list.

Other Sun entries in the Top100 included TiTech's TSUBAME system at position 56, and talk about staying power, TSUBAME entered the Top500 in June 2006 at position 7. CLUMEQ enters the list at position 63, and with an entire empty floor of their unique silo data center available for expansion, CLUMEQ is one site Top500 watchers should keep close watch on in the future. USC, despite losing to Stanford in US College Football this weekend, managed position 71, barely ahead of Clemson at position 79. Clemson CTO Jim Pepin won't comment on if he has a personal goal to overtake his longtime previous employer USC on the Top500 list, but one thing is for sure, on a global basis, the Top500 list has for many years created a competitive spirit among commercial, university, and government supercomputer sites and no doubt done a fare amount through that competition to advance the state of the art.

While Sun Constellation Systems have a much briefer history on the Top500 than many other vendors' systems, we are proud to have more than doubled the number of Sun systems on the current list, including an amazing 3 of the top 5 Intel Nehalem based systems.

CLUMEQ recently unveiled Colossus, the largest Sun Constellation System supercomputer in Canada. The video below talks about the building of Colossus, some of the research planned using the new system, and why it is not only the fastest but one of the greenest and most energy efficient supercomputers in Canada.

Many of you know Sun for our High Performance Computing systems. Well, Sun servers, storage, networking, and software are not the only parts of our high performance portfolio, we have some pretty high performance runners too, not to mention some of them are a bit competitive. To get into the competitive high performance spirit for this weekend's SC09 Sun HPC Consortium, we will kick of the day Saturday with a fun, not too competitive run through the streets of Portland. Meet me and some of the team at 6:45 am on Saturday in front of the Hilton Portland Executive Towers. Registration for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium not required, and even IBM and HP runners are welcome to join in. But sorry, only customers and partners registered for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium can join after the run for the real scoop on the latest in HPC.

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What cuts costs of moving to 10GbE by up to 78% and requires only 1/6 the number of cables? Customers who have registered for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium this weekend in Portland will be among the first to find out.

Sun is one of the leading providers of high performance network fabrics including our Magnum line of QDR InfiniBand switches and we have been an innovator in the 10GbE space since we first introduced dual 10Gbit Ethernet directly integrated onto the UltraSPARC-T2 processor several years ago. Many customers already use high performance fabrics like 10GbE with our two socket, 16-core Sun Blade T6340 server module and as Intel and AMD preview upcoming 6, 8, and 12 core CPUs at SC09 and nearly every vendor talks about some sort of GPU integration, we believe the large majority of customers will need to move to high performance fabrics like QDR IB or 10GbE to take advantage of the ever increasing compute power in their servers.

So don't miss out, be the first to hear about our newest 10GbE products, register now for SC09 Sun HPC Consortium. Sorry IBM and HP employees, this event is for Sun customers, partners, and employees only.

Updates on BMW Oracle Racing to ExaScale computing thoughts from Sun's Chief HPC Architect, Andy Bechtolsheim, are just some of the things you will hear about at the upcoming SC09 Sun HPC Consortium being held immediately prior to SC09, November 14-15th in Portland Oregon. An invitation-only mid-week luncheon with Andy and Intel's Stephen Wheat is already sold out, but we still have a few whisper suite sessions available. This year, we have two whisper suites in our booth on the show floor, so you don't even have to leave the convention center to hear about the most exciting HPC updates.

You won't want to miss this exciting event, so register today.

Ever run out space on your digital camera's flash card? Well, this flash won't quite fit in your camera, but at 1.92 TB in 1RU, my good friends at SmugMug will be using their new flash, a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array to store a lot of pictures. Just how fast is it, or how long would it take to store all the pictures from 1000, 2GB digital camera flash cards onto the F5100? Lets just say SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill called it "crazy fast" in his Twitter post. I guess that is a technical term in the photographic industry. All kidding aside, Don, who is clearly an avid photographer, has also been an avid user of Sun technology over the years, and writes about both in his blog. I look forward to hearing about how SmugMug is using their new F5100 in the coming weeks.

I know my gardening friends on the East Coast will have no pity for my late fall challenges.

Some people are still touting Solid State Disks (SSDs) as hot new technology. Meanwhile, many High Performance Computing (HPC) customers have moved on to more innovative uses of flash technology. Come hear what some of our customers are doing with Sun's flash technology like the Sun Storage F5100 at next month's HPC Consortium meeting immediately prior to SC09 conference in beautiful Portland Oregon. Impatient, don't worry, some Sun HPC customers who participated in early testing of the F5100 already have great things to say about it. Customers like Chuck Sears, Manager of Research Computing at Oregon's very own College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, and Don Thorp, Production Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center, share their experiences with the F5100 in HPC environments.

And while the entire HPC community is focused on the upcoming SC09 conference right now, be sure to save the dates for the other major international supercomputer show, ISC10 starting May 31 in Hamburg Germany. Meanwhile, check out the following video by my favorite movie star, Sun EVP John Fowler, talking about the F5100.

Catch Scott and Larry in the opening keynote, Sunday at 5:45 pm PT on OpenWorld Live. But don't have too much fun tonight, get some rest and join Oracle's Judson Althoff Monday morning for a 5K partner run through the streets of San Francisco, meet Sun & other partners at 5th & Howard at 7 am.

The Gospel of Java according to James.

Oracle Press Release Oracle and Sun Are Faster Than IBM: Proof Now Available

Go to the OpenWorld Live site.

Traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) customers continue to rapidly adopt the latest 40 GB/sec QDR InfiniBand technology delivered by the Sun InfiniBand Switch 648. Recently, Oracle put their weight behind Sun's QDR technology in Exadata v2, incorporating the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 36.. Today, Sun further expands our family of high performance fabrics offering with the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72.

For the first time ever, the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 lets you aggregate up to 72 QDR 4x ports into a single 1RU switch and multiple switches can be combined to cost effectively link up to 576 servers. For larger clusters, the Sun InfiniBand Switch 648 supports up to 648 servers with a single switch, or up to 5184 servers in a full non-blocking fabric using eight 648 port switches.

This week's Forbes article titled, Supercomputing in the Enterprise talks about how non-HPC workloads including server virtualization and consolidation increasingly are adopting HPC technologies like high performance fabrics. While many HPC customers are using large high performance fabrics based on the Sun Datacenter Switch 648 to solve problems that simply couldn't be solved a few years ago, commercial customers increasingly need high performance fabrics just to keep up with advances in multi-core CPU technology.

Lets say that last year you purchased a Sun Blade x6250 server module with two dual-core x86 CPUs. That was a total of four processor core and might easily have required four GigE connections. While we sell a Quad GigE network card, fast forward to today and the same x6250 blade module is equipped with quad core CPUs or a total of eight processor cores. Assuming the same network bandwidth per core was required, that would be 8 GigE connections. Opt instead for the Sun Blade x6275 server module and you get 16 processor cores per server module. If you filled a rack with four Sun Blade 6000 chassis each filled with x6275 blades, and provided a GigE connection for each core, you would need an astounding 640 ethernet cables coming out of the back of the rack. It is no wonder why HPC and commercial customers alike are looking to high performance fabrics that offer cable aggregation and other benefits.

Of course, InfiniBand is not the only high performance fabric available. Sun sells a 10 GigE network card for our blades and also has a 10 Gig Virtual Network Express Module for the Sun Blade 6000.

So no matter if you are looking to build a high performance fabric out of InfiniBand or 10 GigE, Sun has products and solutions that can help you today.

Back from Cape Town, I wanted to finish up my discussion of CHPC with a few photos of their data center infrastructure. As I mentioned in my last post, CHPC uses the new Sun Constellation System Glacier cooling doors, the first such deployment in Africa we are aware of using energy efficient passive cooling doors. In my Jülich Underground post earlier this summer I shared some pictures of Jülich's underground cooling pipe installation. Cape Town being blessed with a more temperate climate than Jülich Germany, Sun's Data Center Strategy, Design, and Build Services team was able to help CHPC design a completely outdoor versus underground cooling infrastructure.

CHPC's data center integrates three high efficiency cooling units which operate in an N+1 redundant fashion. The center can operate on a single cooling tower during most operational conditions, with the second cooling unit providing additional capacity for maximum operations or hot summer days. Meanwhile, the third unit provides redundancy should either of the primary units fail.

While most of Jülich's plumbing and water pumps were under their data center, CHPC was able to locate their's outside next to the cooling units.

And finally, to close of my blog series on CHPC, a look at Cape Town's Table Mountain, one of the many reasons why locals call Cape Town the most beautiful city in the world.

If you haven't already signed up, take a few minutes today to register for Sun's HPC Virtual Conference being held next week. Andy Bechtolsheim and other Sun HPC experts will be joining me for this unique virtual conference dedicated to High Performance Computing to discuss the trends and issues facing the HPC community.

Compute to Compete was certainly the theme of the day as I joined Ms Naledi Pandor Minister of Science and Technology for South Africa at the launch of our latest Sun Constellation System and Africa's largest supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town.

Just a few short months ago, Sun launched the first of our second generation Sun Constellation System at the Jülich Supercomputer Center in Germany. Since then, similar Sun Constellation System supercomputers have been installed in North and South America, in Australia, and in Asia. Today's launch at CHPC brings Open Petascale Computing to a sixth continent, bringing state of the art supercomputing to Africa.

At each Sun Constellation System launch I attend, as I meet with government, education, and industry executives, I hear a common theme, the growing need to compute to compete. While we didn't compare notes prior to the launch, Minister Pandor used the phrase outcompute to outcompete in reference to her government's investment in CHPC as well as South Africa's ongoing competition with Australia to host the Square Kilometer Array project.

CHPC is quite proud of their green IT efforts, and like the Sun Constellation System I described in my blog Jülich Underground, CHPC uses Sun's Glacier passive water cooled doors to save 25% or more of the electricity normally used to cool a data center, a first as far as we know for any African data center. Ironically, CHPC is built on the site of an old ocean fish research lab, and several large walk-in freezers were removed in the renovation of the old lab into data center space. And while they won't freeze fish, the Sun Constellation System's Glacier doors are definitely more efficient in data center cooling than the old freezers. Of course, Sun Constellation System technology is not limited to HPC clusters and having read in the local paper this morning a report estimating South Africa would have to increase electrical generation capacity by 20 Gigawatts by 2020, I couldn't help but comment to Minister Pandor to think how that amount could be reduced if all data centers in South Africa used similar passive cooling technology.

Besides Green IT, another major thrust of CHPC is the use of open source software. Their new Sun Constellation System uses the Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition including the latest versions of Sun Grid Engine software and the Sun Lustre File System.

CHPC also followed the lead of other Sun HPC customers such as HPCVL in Canada and installed a Sun M9000 system, with 256 UltraSPARC CPU cores and 2 TB of memory which will be used to run large share memory codes for computational fluid dynamics research as well as other research requiring a large shared memory system. Running the open source Solaris operating system, the M9000 will provide users a similar HPC environment as the Sun Constellation System including Sun Grid Engine and NFS access to the Lustre file system.

Anyone who thinks Africa isn't ready for world class HPC had better think again!

Thanks to all of you who have inquired if I am being impacted by the terrible fires in the Los Angeles area that as of this afternoon have burned over 105,000 acres. Luckily, I live away from the fire area, but my condolences go out to all of those who have suffered losses. This NASA image from yesterday gives you some idea of the extent of the fire, although the Station Fire has more than doubled in size since that time!

If you want to learn more about how this image was collected and processed, visit the NASA's Earth Observatory site. For up to date information on the fire, I have been following the LA Times web site which is doing an excellent job in covering the blazes.

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.

Today, eSolar opens a new 5 MW Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant outside of Los Angeles.

(Credit eSolar)

For those who are not familiar with eSolar, it is a Bill Gross startup from Idealab and described more in today's Los Angeles Times article.

Knowing that I had a rare week with no travel, I decided last weekend to do a little father-son project and install my own small solar system, thinking at first it would be just the thing to run my teenage son's various portable devices and perhaps the small aquarium in his room. I had been eying the Sunforce 60-watt solar charging kit at Costco my last several visits and decided to take the plunge (Amazon.com carries the kit at a similar price, with free super-shipping and six months interest-free if you use your Amazon charge card, although that didn't work for my weekend impulse buy). The kit includes everything you need to for a small off-grid system except a battery, including all cables, a battery charge controller, and a 200 watt inverter. With the usual caveats, you should even be able to claim the 30% US tax credit for the kit.

So our Saturday started with assembling the PVC frame for the 4 solar panels in our garage. Unfortunately, the factory sealed box was missing one of the PVC pieces needed to complete the frame and I had visions of the rest of the day spent in Costco's return line trying to get an exchange. Luckily, when I returned around noon, a Costco manager was able to promptly help me and took the missing piece out of another box and I was on my way in less than five minute, now that was a pleasant surprise! On my way out, I stopped by Costco's automotive center (separate entrance, separate cashier, no waiting) and purchased a deep-cycle marine battery.

The 200 watt inverter is plenty to run my laptop, cell phone charger, and the small aquarium pump. With no travel and no in-office meetings, I have not had to use my car for work this week, further lessening my carbon footprint. My only complaint is that the 200 watt inverter has a small noise fan that runs continuously when turned on so next weekend's project is to replace it with a larger, 1500 watt inverter that has thermostatically controlled fan.

Knowing just enough about data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to sound impressive at cocktail parties, I realized running the AC inverter only to then have my laptop power adapter convert back to DC was not efficient, so as my Mac laptop battery approaches a full charge, I've been unplugging the inverter and plugging my laptop DC adapter directly into the battery power cable, which avoids an energy-burning DC-AC-DC cycle. The one lonely fish that has survived my son's mostly failed attempts at fish care over the last year doesn't mind that its water is only filtered part of the day!

Before leaving London I had time to grab a quick breakfast at one of the many restaurants located in the Covent Garden area a few blocks from my hotel. There are many small bakeries, cafes, pubs, and varied international fare tucked into the back alleys, although I never found the garden.

Hamburg promised even better running around the beautiful Binnenalster Lake formed out of the river that runs through town. The jogging path around the lake is a little less than 10K and easily accessed from my hotel, Le Meridian. With the next few days packed with customer meetings and International Supercomputer Conference events, I'll need every bit of the nearly 20 hours of daylight right now to get in my daily run.

If your in town this morning, don't miss out on Andy Bechtolsheim's presentation at the Sun HPC Consortium on Sun's HPC Roadmap.

On the way to the Sun HPC Consortium starting today in Hamburg, I stopped off in London to meet first with a few customers. Now twenty-four hours in London is not really enough to get jet-lagged, but here are my tips.

One of my favorite business hotels in Central London is the Sheraton Park Lane. It is conveniently located across from London's Green Park and plenty of lovely running paths. Exiting the Sheraton onto Piccadilly, cross the street to Green Park and head counter-clockwise. Halfway around the park you will get to Buckingham Palace, crossing the street in front of the Palace to get to St. James Park. My typical jet-lag recovery run continues counter-clockwise for a loop around St. James Park, then a reverse clockwise loop, then back across to Green Park continuing counter-clockwise to your starting point. Depending on your pace, its an easy 30-40 minute run which is perfect to get you ready for a sleep-deprived day of customer meetings.

The next key to avoiding jet-lag is to avoid the temptation to skip dinner and go to sleep early. The perfect remedy for that is just a short cab-ride away at Ozer's Turkish Restaurant. While the 11-course "Healthy Meal" special may not sound healthy by the title, it is an absolutely wonderful tasting-size assortment of Turkish specialities with just the right amount of spices to make you forget sleep for a few more hours. For those that prefer, there is a vegetarian option of the healthy meal as well although I quite enjoyed the marinated, grilled chicken and lamb courses of the standard meal.

Tomorrow, I'll share my Hamburg running tips.

If you can't get to Germany for this month's Sun HPC Consortium, you have a second chance coming up in September when we will host the Sun HPC Software Workshop in beautiful Regensburg, Germany. It's a great opportunity for users to get answers, advice, and suggestions regarding their specific implementations, and to share their insights with colleagues.

This three day workshop contains three tracks with Sun and Customer presentations around Sun Grid Engine, Open Storage (including Lustre and SAM-QFS), and software Tools such as Sun Studio and Sun HPC ClusterTools. Talks will range from general to very detailed engineering topics. At times in the schedule the three tracks will merge into one track for specific plenary sessions that have a general interest. For example, a detailed talk on Sun’s HPC Stack would be a plenary session. The conference will begin at 9am on Tuesday and end at 1pm on Thursday.

If you are going to International Supercomputer Conference later this month in Hamburg, there is still time to come early and attend the Sun HPC Consortium. Highlights of the HPC Consortium are sure to be Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim updating the audience on Sun's roadmap for the Sun Constellation System, as well as Dr. Thomas Lippert of the Jülich Supercomputer Center who will give a preview of how one of the first 2000+ node Sun Constellation Systems with Sun's latest "Magnum" QDR InfiniBand switch did in the Top500 Linpack benchmark before the official Top500 update is published later that week. See today's press release for more info on the Jülich system.

The Jülich VIP data center tour was a rare treat. I can only imagine anthropologists examining the site 100's of years from now and wondering why anyone would run 5 MW of power and 1000's of gallons an hour of water into the basement of a gymnasium sized building.

Running a PetaFlop BlueGene system, a 2000 node Sun cluster, and a 1000 node Bull cluster takes a lot of cooling water. The facilities work that goes into a modern HPC data center is an absolutely amazing act of mechanical engineering in and of itself, never mind the computers.

If you look closely you will see the chilled water connector from the Sun Constellation System rear cooling door at the bottom right of the rack. A flexible connector is used to connect to the under-floor chiller water supply. There is also a top-of-door connector (not shown) for customers who run chiller water pipes above the racks.

Here is another shot of the under-floor piping.

Sun also has a gas refrigerant cooling door option for Sun Constellation System. The gas refrigerant door requires smaller diameter piping to the racks and can have other advantages, although it does require an external unit which can be outside the computer room, typically with its own chilled water heat exchanger. Sun's data center design team can help design the ideal data center cooling system for your Sun Constellation System.

Everyone from traditional web hosting companies to university HPC centers are rebranding themselves with the Cloud Computing moniker these days, but what's the reality behind the hype. We certainly have many great hardware and software products that can be used for HPC, web hosting, and just about anything else you would want to do "in a cloud", but when Sun talks about cloud computing, there are a couple of key defining concepts we focus on:

Virtualization

Multi-tenancy

Real-time, user-controlled provisioning

Pay-per-use

We believe there will be many different types of clouds, including public clouds like Amazon's offerings and the Sun Cloud, enterprise clouds, clouds run by service providers, and other hybrid offerings.

My group at Sun, besides selling large HPC systems, is responsible for helping customers build enterprise clouds using Sun's technology. Many of our customers are starting down the path of building enterprise clouds, most are not ready to talk about it in public. So I was very excited to read about NASA's enterprise cloud, called Nebula, and how it is using the Sun Lustre file system as a key part of their cloud architecture. The Nebula web site gives a detailed description of their Lustre implementation.

My group has, of course, worked on most of the large Lustre deployments, including many on non-Sun hardware, that have been done around the world. One thing we realized is that not everyone has rocket scientists on their staff, and even if they do, they don't always want to spend their time custom-designing Lustre storage systems. So to help HPC and enterprise cloud customers simplify and accelerate the deployment of Lustre, we have created the Sun Lustre Storage System. Scaling from 1 to over 100 GB/sec, the modular architecture of the Sun Lustre Storage System makes it easy for anyone to deploy Lustre.

In the coming days, you will be hearing a lot more about the Sun Cloud, and many other Sun technologies being used in our cloud deployments.

The Jülich web site has been updated with a nice shot of the Sun Constellation System. They also have details on the technical configuration.

Here is a good view of three of the six Sun Magnum QDR switches at Jülich. Each switch has 648 QDR IB ports exposed as 216 CXP 12x connectors.

I won't show pictures of the other vendor's IB rack, but just think about this with three times as many cables.

Of course, the cabling gets even more challenging under the floor.

But it sure likes nice when you are all done.

And here is the team to thank for all that hard work, yours truly just there for the picture op as I have to say I didn't help with any of this.

Memorial Day started about 9 hours too early for me, as the first rays of sunlight broke through the bottom of the window shade in United Airlines 747 as we descended towards Frankfurt airport. I'm visiting Germany this week for the grand opening of the new Jülich Supercomputer Center, and its 2000 node Sun Constellation System. The Jülich system is one of the first large QDR-based InfiniBand supercomputers, but we expect that 40 Gb/sec QDR technology will rapidly replace the previous generation 20 Gb/sec DDR technology in large clusters, not only because of its higher bandwidth but also because of the improved latency of QDR.

The Jülich system also features a Sun Lustre Storage System directly connected to its InfiniBand network, using multiple Lustre Object Storage Servers (OSS) to provide high speed & parallel access to large single namespace filesystem easily expandable to PetaBytes of storage and 10's or even 100's of GB/sec of storage bandwidth (Oak Ridge National Labs has achieved over 200 GB/sec on their Sun Lustre system).

One unique feature the Jülich system is its InfiniBand fabric using Sun and Mellanox QDR switches. Besides the 2000 node Sun Constellation System using Sun Magnum QDR switches, the Jülich QDR fabric also supports a 1000 node Bull cluster using Mellanox QDR switches. While both the Sun and Bull supercomputers are built out of 2-socket Intel Nehalem compute nodes, the physical size and complexity of the systems stands in stark contrast. Using regular 4x IB cables to connect to the Mellanox switches, the Bull cluster, while only half the number of compute nodes, requires more cables than the Sun Constellation System with its 3-in-1 12x cables. In addition, the Sun Constellation System racks require no internal cables to connect the compute nodes to its built-in "QNEM", the world's first in-chassis QDR leaf switch. While most Sun Constellation Systems use the QNEM to build a fully connected "fat tree" IB fabric, the QNEM also supports mesh and 3D Torus IB fabrics, the latter being used at a Sun Constellation System being deployed at Sandia National Labs in the US.

Bull does a good job of packing 72 of their Nehalem compute nodes into a single rack, but counting their IB racks still requires almost 2x the floorspace of the Sun Constellation System sporting 96 compute nodes in each rack.

Jülich choose Sun's new water-cooled rear door option for the Sun Constellation System, greatly simplifying the cooling design of their data center. Depending on exact CPU and memory configuration, Sun Constellation System racks can require 30-40 KW of cooling per rack which requires some sort of supplemental cooling. Sun provides both water-cooled and refrigerant gas cooled rear door options for Sun Constellation System racks. This approach has advantages over in-row or top-of-rack based supplemental cooling systems in that no supplemental fans are required, air is moved through the cooling doors using only the blade chassis's build-in fans.The supplemental fans in in-row and top-of-rack systems are often left out of customer's power-usage calculations. Sun's Data Center Efficiency practice can help customers design more efficient data centers, be it an entire new from the ground up data center or retrofitting an existing data center.

Well, it is time to head off to the grand opening ceremonies, I'll be back afterwards with more of the story.

In between planning for our upcoming HPC Consortium user group meeting prior to next month's ISC09 conference, I've had a busy week meeting with a number of our HPC partners. I started off the week meeting with Cray's CEO Pete Ungaro. Cray is one of our Lustre partners, offering their customers storage solutions based on the Sun Lustre file system. I also met with Sun partner Integrated Media Technologies. IMT is one of our first partners to qualify for our new Sun HPC Elite partner program, bringing their expertise in Lustre, InfiniBand, and GPGPU technology to our customers. Speaking of GPGPU, yesterday I met with Shanker Trivedi Nvidia's new VP of sales for GPGPU and professional graphics technologies. A number of Sun customers are adding GPGPU's to their Sun clusters, most notably the TiTech TSUBAME supercomputer which now includes 170 Nvidia Tesla GPGPUs.

Want to hear more about Sun's latest plans for Lustre, InfiniBand, and GPGPU technology? June is a wonderful month to visit Germany and the HPC Consortium user group meeting in Hamburg promises to bring you updates in all these areas. There is still time to register at the reduced early bird registration fee. I hope to see many of you there.