Sun Spotlights Open Storage & Open Source Software for HPC

By DE Editors

At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2008) in Dresden, Germany, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) announced its HPC portfolio offers new products and solutions to enable mainstream HPC customers to benefit from the Sun Constellation System, which runs the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Linux.

Sun Constellation System additions enable customers to scale from a single rack at approximately 7 teraflops (TFlops) to more than 2 petaflops (PFlops) within the same, compatible architecture — letting customers deploy a scalable high-performance cluster in any datacenter. Sun also announced a new Storage and Archive solution for HPC and updated software and development tools that simplify HPC cluster installation and management.

New additions to the Sun Constellation System family include the Sun Blade X6450 server module, which features 2- or 4-quad core Intel Xeon processors, providing up to 7.37 TFlops in a single Sun Constellation System Rack and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24 (a smaller version of the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456), which features 72 DDR 4X Infiniband ports. Together, these new additions to the Sun Constellation System allow customers to build mid-size clusters using the same architecture as that deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Sun’s Open Storage delivers up to 90 percent in cost savings compared to proprietary storage. Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC is based on the Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM) and Sun StorageTek QFS shared file system software infrastructure, which balances high-performance access with more economical bulk storage in a single integrated architecture.

Solaris ZFS File System performance and integrated volume management capabilities are an integral component in OpenSolaris. Solaris ZFS delivers maximum data integrity and can reduce downtime by more than half.

Sun’s HPC software stack simplifies HPC through the use of new Open Source software and development tools that enable customers to simplify HPC cluster installation and management, and ease software development of optimized HPC applications; Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 1.0 speeds cluster deployment times by up to 10x; Sun xVM Ops Center 1.1 supports RedHat and SuSE Linux variants along with Solaris; and more.

Also Sun HPC Cluster Tools 8.0 provides developers with the tools to create and tune Message-passing Interface (MPI) applications that run on high performance clusters and SMPs; Sun Grid Engine 6.2 enhances scalability by supporting larger grids; and the new Sun Single Point of Contact API managed service helps customers manage their third party support contracts.

To download Sun’s software updates, or for more on the Sun Visualization System, Sun Constellation System, Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24, Sun Blade X6450, Sun xVM Ops Center, HPC Storage and Archival Solution, and more HPC information, go to Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.