Sun Bulks Up HPC System with Software, Storage Offerings

Sun also is making a number of moves with its storage offerings. Lustre 1.9.0 offers new features designed to improve system performance, including adaptive timeouts, OSS read caching and version-based recovery.

Sun also is previewing a high-density offering within its Sun Storage 7000 "Amber Road" family, which will offer up to 1.5 petabytes of capacity and will integrate SSD (solid-state drive) storage and Sun's Fishworks management software, Brown said. The new storage system will enable users to scale up their storage with no point of failure, he said.

In another preview, Sun is showing off its flash array for the enterprise, with up to 2TB of storage in a 1U (1.75-inch) system. It will offer I/O rates equivalent to 3,000 disk drives while consuming 300 watts of power, which fits well with the push for more energy-efficient data centers, Brown said.

Sun has made it a priority to use flash memory throughout its server and storage hardware lineup, saying it offers better throughput, lower latency and improved energy efficiency over traditional storage technologies.

Also at the HPC show, Sun will demonstrate its upcoming Sun Blade X6240 and Sun Blade X6440 systems, both powered by Advanced Micro Devices' new six-core "Istanbul" Opteron processor. The systems will offer up to 12 teraflops of performance per rack, Brown said.

The new Istanbul systems complement the servers that Sun introduced in April in conjunction with Intel's release of its Xeon 5500 Series "Nehalem EP" processors.

All the new offerings introduced and previewed at the supercomputing show will be released throughout the end of 2009, Brown said.