Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Today's launch of the Sun Blade x6440 server module brings new levels of performance to the Sun Constellation System. With its industry leading memory footprint and I/O performance, the Sun Blade X6440 server module posted a world record 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications (Sun Blade X6440 server module, 4 chips, 16 cores, 16 OMP threads, 35896 SPECompMpeak2001). Delivering on Sun's future proof blade server design, the Sun Blade x6440 brings new levels of scalability to the Sun Constellation System supercomputer. In fact, if TACC's Ranger supercomputer, currently #6 on the Top500 list, were to be upgraded with x6440 modules, I estimate it would jump from its current 6th place ranking to #3 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Of course, since not everyone needs a half petaflop supercomputer, unlike some of the other proprietary systems in the Top 10, the Sun Constellation System scales down to much lower cost supercomputers that you don't need a roomful of PhD's to design or operate. In fact, the new Sun Compute Cluster solution offers customers pre-integrated, tried and true HPC clusters based on the Sun Constellation System which can be ordered today and deployed without the cost or complexity of traditional supercomputer procurements. Check out Sun's complete HPC portfolio online, including a number of new webcasts recently published from the SC08 show last month.

Of course, Sun realizes that with today's ever more tightly squeezed budgets, not everyone can afford to upgrade the compute capacity of their supercomputer. So Sun offers you a number of cost savings ways to squeeze more out of your current cluster. For starters, you can use Sun xVM Ops Center to manage your cluster, just like TACC uses xVM Ops Center to manage Ranger. Thanks in part to Sun software like xVM Ops Center, Ranger has one of the highest uptimes and utilization rates of any of the NSF funded TeraGrid rsources (click on the resources tab to see realtime TeraGrid utilization). Of course, once you start squeezing more useful work out of your existing cluster with xVM, you will probably need to add storage. Don't worry if you can't afford to buy another expensive big box proprietary storage box, Sun's new Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems can provide flash-accelerated open storage to any vendor's HPC cluster at a fraction of the price of what you are probably paying today.