Sun Introduces Midrange HPC Servers for Technical Applications
Sun Microsystems, Inc. this week strengthened its place in the high performance computing (HPC) market with the introduction of four supercomputing-class servers aimed at customers running compute-intensive applications in high performance midrange technical environments.
The Sun HPC 3500, 4500, 5500 and 6500 servers, running the Solaris operating system, address the needs of technical, floating point-intensive customers. As in commercial environments, technical users increasingly need to manage large data sets requiring access to standard database software originally developed for business applications. This convergence of technical and business application requirements necessitates an HPC architectural approach based on general-purpose, scalable, fat-node SMP systems and clusters.
Sun HPC systems scale from one to 30 processors in a single SMP node, and up to 120 processors in a 4-node cluster, offering customers industry-leading scalability and performance. The new servers provide supercomputing-class processing power via 336 MHz UltraSPARC II CPUs and the new 84 MHz-100 MHz Sun Gigaplane system bus.
According to Sun, the HPC 3500-6500 systems are the first midrange HPC servers with dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing features for online repair and configuration of system resources and I/O, providing technical users unprecedented levels of system availability and reliability.
The HPC 3500 server houses up to eight CPUs in a single node, with up to five slots for fast, easy performance expansion. The system provides internal Sun StorEdge fibre channel disk drives with dual-port connections for the higher I/O performance demanded by technical applications. It also features hot pluggable components, dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing features, and the ability to mirror the internal fibre channel drives, capabilities unmatched by any other eight-way system in this class today. The HPC 3500 system offers 33% more power than the Sun HPC 3000 server it replaces, yet maintains the same footprint.
The HPC 4500 server is the line's most compact package for technical users with space concerns, such as customers in the automotive, financial and petroleum sectors, housing up to 14 CPUs and eight system slots in its flexible footprint.
The HPC 5500 server also provides up to 14 CPUs and eight system slots, but in a larger cabinet, while the HPC 6500 server offers up to 30 CPUs and 16 system slots. Both the Sun HPC 5500 and 6500 systems are housed in tall cabinets (68 inches), allowing for more resources and half a terabyte of internal storage via Sun StorEdge A5000 fibre channel arrays.
Sun's HPC server family is a line of six high-performance SMP systems with binary compatibility across the company's product line. The line includes scalable systems ranging in size from a four-processor Sun HPC 450 system to the 64-processor Sun HPC 10000 system. The servers are complemented by Sun's HPC 2.0 software, designed specifically for compute-intensive, technical computing environments. The software enables both the development and execution of serial and parallelized high-performance applications. It provides middleware to facilitate and manage the workload of highly resource-intensive applications on Sun's HPC servers, as well as clusters of these servers.
Edited by Beth Brindle
For more information: Maria Villarino, Sun Microsystems, Inc., 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303. Tel: 650-786-3205.