Monday June 25, 2007

Andy spoke today at the HPC Consortium meeting in Dresden about the five key challenges to building petascale (as in 10^15 floating-point operations per second) computer systems. They are: scaling application performance, keeping the bandwidth-to-FLOPs ratio balanced in the system, scaling the interconnect fabric, power efficiency and cooling, and reliability to support capability applications.

He went on to describe in detail how Sun will build petascale computers using a concept that will be officially previewed at ISC in Dresden tomorrow. He talked about network topologies, mechanical issues, power, cooling, and compute density, and then showed how our technologies will be used to build the 500+ TFLOP Ranger system to be installed later this year at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and other sites which have not yet been disclosed.

More details and perhaps some photos tomorrow after the announcement.