Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Well, I'm just itching to share more details on the Sun Constellation System supercomputer that Australia's Bureau of Meteorology recently purchased. Unfortunately I'll have to wait a bit longer as the system contains a number of components we can't publically discuss until they are announced by their respective vendors. The field of Weather and Ocean Modeling has long been dominated by proprietary supercomputer systems such as NEC SX and IBM Power systems, so one has to conjecture that the Intel Nehalem CPUs in the Bureau of Meteorology's new system must have fared pretty well in benchmarks. Of course, Intel would prefer to wait until their public launch of Nehalem to say exactly how well. However, it does appear that the long standing dominance of proprietary systems in climate modeling has neared its end.

This should come to no surprise to Sun HPC followers. After all, it was the Sun-powered TSUBAME supercomputer at Tokyo Institute of Technology that first pushed NEC's Earth Simulator off the map as Japan and Asia Pacific's fastest supercomputer in 2006. And Ranger, the Sun Constellation System installed at TACC in early 2008 has been used for many climate modeling tasking, including

tornado simulation. Of course the Sun Constellation System architecture is not just about compute power, it includes powerful open storage components based on Sun's Lustre parallel file system (which, notably is also used in some of IBM's largest supercomputers), and InfiniBand networking. So expect Sun to be following up Intel's Nehalem launch with our own Sun Constellation System updates, including even more scalable storage and networking. For now, you will just have to trust the Aussies on how good it really is!