"Sun has been challenging the HPC status quo for more than two decades. The Sun Constellation System reinvented the HPC cluster and is now deployed by customers across the globe", stated John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. "Today we're applying that trademark innovation to new segments of the HPC market with new Open Storage and compute clusters. These solutions are just the beginning - look for our Open Storage products to radically change the economics of the HPC market."

Today's news follows Sun's announcement last week of the Sun Storage 7000 "Amber Road" family, the world's first Open Storage appliances that offer breakthrough analytic capabilities, significant performance increases, one-quarter of the energy consumption, installation in under five minutes and up to 75 percent cost savings - all compared to competing storage systems. The Sun Fire X4500 and Sun Fire X4540 storage servers, in addition to other Open Storage solutions, also figure prominently in many of Sun's HPC customer deals.

Sun is previewing a range of HPC technologies at the Supercomputing 2008 show, such as the next-generation 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's newest blade server that will be available by the end of the year - the Sun Blade X6440 server module powered by the latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors code-named "Shanghai" - posted the best x86 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications.

The Sun Storage Cluster combines high-performance Sun Fire servers and hybrid data servers with the Lustre file system and a high-speed interconnect to maximize performance, scalability and productivity. The solution will enable customers to scale capacity from 48 terabytes to multiple petabytes, and scale performance I/O rates from 1 GB per second to more than 100 GB per second. In addition, custom configuration and delivery by the Sun Customer Ready Programme makes the solution ready to deploy and easy to manage.

Ideal for divisional and departmental customers that run compute-intensive applications, such as structural analysis, signal processing, and financial trading, the Sun Compute Cluster is a pre-configured HPC scalable cluster including Sun Fire rackmount servers or Sun Blade servers, pre-loaded open source software, and Infiniband or Ethernet high-bandwidth interconnect. The solution is designed to scale from up to eight racks of compute nodes and will be offered in specific configurations for the mechanical computer aided engineering and financial services industries, in addition to a wide range of configurations for a variety of HPC customers.

Sun is also announcing a variety of open source software solutions and upgrades to simplify HPC deployments. HPC software includes:

• Lustre 1.8: Introduces new features to the Lustre open source parallel file system, such as version-based recovery, interoperability with 1.6 clients, adaptive time-out, and more.
• Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1: Offers enhanced performance and scalability, including processor affinity support, a high-performance MPI and parallel job launcher.
• Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 1.1: Gives customers an option of deploying Sun HPC Software on a Linux HPC cluster running RHEL 5.2; upgrades several stack components, including the new Lustre cluster file system release (1.6.6) and OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED 1.3.1).
• Sun HPC Software, Solaris Developer Edition Beta 1: An integrated Solaris-based parallel application development environment packaged as virtual machines that can be used with Sun xVM VirtualBox or VMware for quick deployment.
• Sun Studio Express 11/08: Incorporates new features to Sun Studio software such as full compiler support for OpenMP 3.0 APIs, support for performance analysis of MPI applications, remote development and debugging, and improved performance for x86 and SPARC architectures. Sun Studio Express 11/08 software combined with the OpenSolaris 2008.05 OS continue to demonstrate a robust performance improvement from generation to generation of processor architectures by delivering the World Record SPECompM2001score for all 16-thread x86 systems. This score represents a 19 percent performance boost from systems with the previous generation of AMD Opteron processors, while demonstrating up to 9 percent better power consumption.
• Sun Shared Visualization Software 1.1.1: Includes performance enhancements to Sun Shared Visualization Software, which enables users to remotely access and share 3D-accelerated applications that run on a central resource.