Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

The Sun Constellation System, the world's first open petascale architecture, unveiled on June 26, 2007 by Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

The first thing that greeted you as you pulled into the parking lot of Dresden's Westin Bellevue hotel for Sun's HPC Consortium was our Supercomputer in a Box, aka Project Blackbox. However, the draw of the morning was definitely Andy Bechtolsheim's presentation on what was sitting across the river on the ISC floor in another box. A standing room only crowd heard Andy talk about what others will have to wait another day for. But I'll just give a few teasers. Sun's solution for open petaflop computing doesn't require a million processor cores. We aren't sure running OpenMPI across a million cores makes sense. Instead, were sticking with industry standard x86 processors from Intel and AMD. Stay tuned, tomorrow you can hear the rest of the story. Any oh yes, it does run Solaris too.

To prepare a big week of Solaris and HPC big announcements, why not spend your Sunday afternoon browsing this new Sun BluePrint on the use of Sun Grid Engine (SGE) to schedule jobs and manage compute resources on Tokyo Institude of Technology's Tsubame supercomputer. In the last year, SGE has managed well over 1 million compute jobs on the Tsubame cluster. Then you can try out the latest Sun Grid Engine 6.1 for yourself. New in SGE 6.1 is a Solaris DTrace provider to help diagnose bottlenecks as well as a host of other new features. SGE does run on a number of other OSes besides Solaris, but sorry, the DTRace provider only works on Solaris. For a limited time, Sun is also offering 30 days of no cost support, via email, for customers who download and register SGE 6.1. Try it out today.

If you thought I was going to pre-announce anything we have planned for this week, sorry, even my blog readers will have to wait like everyone else to see what is in the box.

This is part of the TACC's new supercomputer on its way to Austin.

I can't quite say what is in the box yet. I can tell you that it runs Solaris. We shipped an exact copy to the International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden where we will be unveiling it in the Sun booth on Tuesday evening right after the show opens. So stay tuned, you will soon know what all the excitement is about.