Sun Microsystems Wins Big in Top 500; Expands Blade and Constellation Technologies

  • 06/18/08
Sun Microsystems is scaling up its high performance computing portfolio and showing within the stratospheric top 5 on the Top 500 Supercomputers list. At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany, the company today celebrated its capture of the Top 500's number four spot by a Sun Constellation System-based supercomputer and announced the availability of its newest Sun Blade x64 system.

The Constellation System-powered computer that earned the coveted Top 500 ranking is located at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and is the highest-ranked system yet based on open architecture. The Sun Constellation System runs the Solaris Operating System and Linux.

John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun Systems, commented on implications for other datacenters, "Working with TACC, we've delivered the highest ranking system built on an open architecture and open platforms and made it possible for customers the world over to take advantage of the power of superscale technologies in their own departments. With Sun's Constellation System, customers don't have to dream about a supercomputing Ferrari, they can drive their own."

Along with the Top 500 win, Sun announced two new additions to the Sun Constellation System product family: The new Sun Blade X6450 server module and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24. The X6450 can deliver up to 7.37 TFlops in a single Sun Constellation System Rack. The new Sun Datatcenter Switch is a smaller version of the 3456, which features 72 DDR 4X Infiniband ports. Sun's vision is that customers may incorporate these two new products in similar compute architectures as the highly rated system deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

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