At the Supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, Sun unveils products for the high-performance computing market. Sun is showing preconfigured clustered storage and computing hardware-software packages and data center management software designed specifically for HPC systems like those at well-known labs such as Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.One of the mainstays of Sun
Microsystems' business over the 26 years of its existence has
been high-performance computing. On Nov. 18, at the Supercomputing conference
in Austin, Texas,
Sun unveiled a list of new products aimed squarely at that market.
Sun introduced new preconfigured clustered storage and computing hardware-software
packages and new data center management software designed specifically for HPC
shopsfacilities that include such well-known national labs as National
Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.
"We've made significant upgrades all across the board in our HPC
line, from storage, to interconnect, to fabric and compute," John Fowler,
Sun's executive vice president of systems, told me. "We've doubled the
performance of the fabric, we've added new processors and cooling solutions to
the compute side, and we've significantly expanded the storage element."
Sun's new Open
Storage Cluster package, which comes as a preintegrated bundle,
combines Sun Fire servers and hybrid data servers with the open-source Lustre
file system and a high-speed interconnect. Storage Cluster enables users to
scale capacity from 48TB to multiple petabytes and performance from 1GB per
second to more than 100GB per second.
Sun's Compute
Cluster, also a preintegrated bundle, is aimed at small to midsize
data centers that run computing-intensive applications, such as analysis,
signal processing, trading and CAE/EDA (electronic design automation).
This preconfigured HPC scalable cluster uses Sun Fire rack-mounted or blade
servers with preloaded open-source software. The interconnects are either
InfiniBand or high-bandwidth Ethernet.
"You may not know that nine of the top 10 supercomputers in the world are
using Sun storage productsincluding Lustre [which Sun uses in all its servers
and arrays], archive products and related software," Fowler said.
"Fifty percent of the top 50 [supercomputer systems] are now using Lustre.
"'Amber
Road' [Sun's new high-throughput storage appliance] will
also be of particular interest to HPC
customersthey, of course, are using enterprise storage, and they're always
interested in performance and cost points," Fowler said.
Click here to read more about Sun's first storage appliance, code-named Amber Road, unveiled Nov. 10.
Finally, Sun announced a list of open-source software releases designed to
simplify these HPC deployments. They include: Lustre 1.8, which
introduces version-based recovery, interoperability with 1.6 clients and adaptive
time-out; Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1, which includes processor affinity
support, a high-performance MPI and parallel job launcher; and Sun HPC
Software, Linux Edition 2.0, which provides Linux users with a ready-made
software stack for HPC clusters.