Busy Week for Sun in Florida

By DE Editors

This has been a busy week of announcements for Sun Microsystems, Inc.(Santa Clara, CA) at SuperComputing 2006 conference in Tampa, Florida,where the company unveiled what it calls a portfolio of new servicepackages and HPC technologies. The new solutions include a workstationand servers, storage, a variety of grid and HPC software tools, andother announcements of interest to the engineering IT and computingcommunity. Here’s a quick run down of Sun’s multifaceted announcements.

The new Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation is an x64 workstation powered bythe Next Generation AMD Opteron processor said by Sun says to be “anideal platform for HPC applications.” Click here for more information.

The Sun Blade 8000 P blade server is a modular system suitable forhigh-end x64 cluster and grid computing, according to the company. Saidto offer “triple the density” of today’s rackmount systems, the SunBlade 8000 P supports up to 240 cores and can surpass 1.2 teraFLOPS ina single rack. For more information, click here.

Sun also previewed the Sun Visualization System for HPC, an open,scalable, fully integrated, and customizable solution based on Sun’sworkstations and servers. The Sun Visualization System for HPC isdesigned for viewing and analyzing large amounts of complex data,creating, and managing visualization resources.

Software announcements include Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 and a previewversion of Sun Studio Express. The latter is set of parallelizing C,C++, and Fortran compilers and tools for both Solaris and Linuxplatforms. Developers can download free, unrestricted, copies of SunStudio Express by clicking here.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7, which supports Infiniband and is based on OpenMPI, is a set of tools for parallel program development, resourcemanagement, system administration and cluster administration. Clickhere for download information.

On the grid front, Sun announced a three modules for the Grid Engineopen source project as well as the new Sun Grid Rack System forScalable Storage features the Sun Fire X4500 server and, through acollaboration with Cluster File Systems, the Lustre file system.

Finally, to help organizations sort through and deploy all this, SunHPC Quick Start Services. These are described as a comprehensive suiteof services designed to help you architect, implement, and manage anHPC environment quickly and cost-effectively.

For more information on all of Sun’s HPC offerings, click here.

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