Sun Microsystems Opens World-Class Solution Center

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (www.sun.com) announced the opening of its Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing (HPC), a cutting-edge facility located in Hillsboro, Ore., that is designed to make HPC practical and attainable for a wide array of customers and partners.

The facility offers customers access to world-class scientists and algorithm experts who specialize in developing and deploying large-scale HPC solutions based on best practices, and also provides them access to some of the highest-performance storage, x64 (x86, 64-bit) and SPARC(R) processor-based systems on the planet. In this unique environment, customers and partners will also have an option of deploying and running their applications on a variety of environments, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), and standard distributions of Linux and Windows.
The facility and HPC experts can help customers build and achieve large-scale HPC clusters and data centers as they experiment, benchmark, test and optimize scalable grid-based applications suitable for industries such as energy, manufacturing, life sciences, education and research.

"Today's announcement marks another milestone in delivering solutions for HPC and supercomputing. By leveraging Sun's decades of innovation and expertise, customers can use the Sun Solution Center for HPC to quickly and cost-effectively deploy large-scale cluster systems. In addition, the power efficiency of our Sun Fire servers powered with SPARC and AMD Opteron(TM) processors help make large-scale computing a viable option for many customers. With the recent acquisition of StorageTek, we hope to feature StorageTek products in the lab soon," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

As HPC is becoming more mainstream, Sun recognizes that HPC is not just an esoteric style of computing. In fact, the Sun Solution Center for HPC, open for business today, allows customers and partners from the business and scientific worlds alike to come test and tune their applications.

Customers such as Aachen University and Clemson University plan to use the new facility for testing upcoming HPC projects. "With the new Sun Solution Center for HPC we can test and tune our grid-based applications, leveraging the highest-performance x64 servers in the market," said Jim Leylek, director and professor of mechanical engineering, Advanced Computational Research Laboratory (ACRL), Clemson University.

A key to the development of the Sun Solution Center for HPC is Sun's powerful and strategic partnerships with AMD, the developer of the AMD Opteron processor, and SilverStorm Technologies, the provider of the Center's InfiniBand cluster.

"Collaborating with innovative companies such as Sun to develop state-of-the-art solutions that can later be deployed in more general compute environments is at the heart of what AMD does," said Ben Williams, vice president, commercial business, AMD.

As the need for computational power grows, scientists, researchers and engineers need to run simulations that require thousands of times more compute power than current systems deliver.

The facility's computing structure was built using a unique building-block approach through Sun's Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program, which customers can leverage to deploy their own large-scale HPC environments. With immense compute capacity that offers leading price/performance and power efficiency, the Sun Solution Center for HPC demonstrates Sun's investment and drive to accelerate Sun's growth in the HPC market. It runs more than 600 high-performance and energy-efficient Sun Fire x64 multi-core available servers powered AMD Opteron processors with over 100TB of SunStorEdge Arrays.