Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Friday November 21, 2008

Sun announced a slew of new solutions at Supercomputing 2008
Sun is finally back into the HPC market with a slew of new announcements that make it truly competitive in more than a decade. These systems/solutions (including storage, server clusters, blade servers, new software and interconnects) were showcased in Sun Technology Demos at Supercomputing 2008. Some of the new products include:

Sun Constellation System - with double the storage capacity, double the cores and double the compute nodes of the original Sun Constellation System, the "Genesis" storage array, new "Magnum" switch solutions, the "Glacier" cooling door and storage flash arrays
Sun Storage Cluster: Based on a previous Sun Unified Storage Systems announcement, this solution includes Solaris ZFS to transparently cache data on SSDs, and reduce latencies and remove I/O bottlenecks. IMO, these recent solutions bring Sun back into the storage market, which Sun has gradually ceded over the past two decades (Sun used to be king of attached storage when I joined Sun, about 20 years ago).
Sun Compute Cluster is a pre-integrated highly scalable system consisting of Sun Fire Servers and Sun Blade server modules with infiniband or ethernet connectors that can handle large data sets and workloads.
Lustre 1.8 with features such as version-based recovery, interoperability with 1.6 clients, adaptive time-out.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1 now offers enhanced performance and scalability, including processor affinity support, a high-performance MPI and parallel job launcher.
Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 1.1 and Solaris Developer Edition Beta 1 is a new software bundle with a new OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution
Sun Studio Express 11/08. I already outlined the main features in a previous blog. New tests continue to demonstrate a robust performance improvement from generation to generation of processor architectures by delivering a new World Record SPECompM2001score, as mentioned in a previous blog.
Sun Shared Visualization Software 1.1.1 which enables users to remotely access and share 3D-accelerated applications that run on a central resource.