Wednesday June 06, 2007

Today Sun announced its new Sun Blade 6000 Blade family, courtesy of Andy Belchtolsheim and his team. The new chassis is 10 rack-units high and can hold 10 blades with your choice of AMD, Intel, or Niagara (UltraSPARC T1) processors. The Intel blade supports either one or two dual or quad-core Xeon processors. The AMD blade has two dual-core Opteron processors. And the Niagara blade supports a single, 32-thread UltraSPARC T1 processor.

All of these blades have eight DIMM slots per CPU socket to support applications with large memory requirements and to allow systems to remain balanced as the number of cores per socket continues to increase over time. With 4 Gbyte DIMMs, these new blades support 32 GBytes per CPU socket.

Benchmark results, including a new record on four-thread OMP2001, are here.

For HPC customers especially, we've defined a "scalable unit" that includes a rack with three 6000 chassis populated with 30 Intel or AMD-based blades, InfinBand cabling and a DDR Voltaire InfiniBand fabric. Diagram to the left and further details are here.