This past weekend the first Project Blackbox customer deployment went
live. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), based on the
Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif., received a shipping
container rigged with 252 computing systems. Below are pictures of the container getting delivered.
SLAC, which studies subatomic particles for the U.S. Energy Department,
had been challenged to find ways to add computing resources quickly.
"We can't expand fast enough," said Richard Mount, the director of
scientific computing at SLAC, earlier this year in an article published
by Bloomberg. Mount went on to say that Project Blackbox is "...the
fastest way we can house computers." The Project Blackbox
system is anticipated to boost the SLAC
computing capacity by a third.
SLAC is just the first of what we at Sun hope are many Project Blackbox
customer deployments. And the good news, according to Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief
technology officer, is that customer demand is strong. "Suffice it to say we
have a very robust pipeline of interest," Greg is quoted as saying.
While SLAC was getting its new computing resources another Project
Blackbox container continued its tour of Europe. And we've now locked down on dates for an Asia/Pacific tour in the Fall:
Singapore: October 1, 2, 3
Beijing: October 22, 23, 24
Tokyo: November 12, 13, 14
Seoul: November 21, 22, 23
Sydney: December 18, 19, 20
Posted by Luke on July 18, 2007 at 12:19 AM PDT #