USC Adds Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire x64 Servers

HostReview.com
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; 08:33 AM

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (www.sun.com), announced that the University of Southern California (USC) Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC), has added Sun Microsystems' leading dual-core Sun Fire V20z x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered with the AMD Opteron processors to its powerful supercomputer cluster.

USC purchased 360 dual-core Sun Fire V20z servers for the HPCC supercomputer cluster, selecting them for their advanced cooling capabilities, smaller form factor, energy efficiency and superior price/performance.

"We look to Sun as one of our key partners when augmenting our HPCC environment. When we wanted to boost the speed and power of our supercomputer, we decided to use the dual-core Sun Fire V20z server," said Mike Pearce, USC's deputy CIO.

Preliminary testing performed at the Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing (HPC) in Hillsboro, Ore., clearly demonstrated that Sun's servers can deliver near 85 percent of the peak floating point performance on the Linpack Benchmark, which is a highly parallel computing test designed to measure how fast a computer system can solve linear equations, a common task in engineering and scientific applications.

Following its investment in Sun Fire V20z servers, USC recently implemented an enterprise-class Sun Fire x64 server in its HPCC.