Sun Microsystems Announces Additions to its Constellation System

Sun Microsystems has released new additions to the Sun Constellation System including a new InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) switch for optimal cluster interconnect performance; Sun HPC Software; Linux Edition 2.0 for faster and simpler cluster deployment; and Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 3 for ease of management.

 

The company also announced enhancements to the Lustre file system which manages data for several supercomputers.

 

The new products will enhance the Sun Constellation System which is designed using Sun’s Open Network Systems architecture and it is an integrated and balanced HPC system, said the company.

 

Sun Datacenter InfiniBand QDR Switch 648 delivers high density and it reduces deployment complexity with more posts per rack, more system bandwidth and up to 3:1 cable reduction, according to the company. The HPC Software, Linux Edition 2.0 hastens the installation of Linux-based environments by providing an integrated Linux software stack for HPC solutions and allows customers to run SUSE 10, CentOS and Red Hat (News - Alert) Linux.

 

Lustre 1.8.0 includes many features for improving system performance and functionality like adaptive timeouts feature, client interoperability feature, OSS read cache feature and Version-based Recovery (VBR).

 

Sun said that its Constellation System will power large HPC systems which have more than two PetaFLOPS of performance installed already. Nine out of the top ten supercomputers use Sun Storage technologies including Lustre and tape storage.

 

The company also announced new HPC customers including Toshiba (News - Alert) Research Europe which replaced five racks of white-box systems with two Sun Blade 6000 chassis filled with Sun Blade X6450 server modules, powered by Intel (News - Alert) Xeon six-core processors. Sun HPC software will be deployed with Linux and Sun Grid Engine software. This solution will help Toshiba for advanced fundamental research in the field of wireless communications.

 

Many open source software solutions and upgrades to simplify HPS deployments were also announced. They include Sun Studio 12 Update 1 which has new features to enhance the creation of parallel applications for the latest multicore x86 and SPARC-based systems running on Linux platforms like Solaris OS or Open Solaris.

 

The other software tools released by Sun include HPS ClusterTools 8.2, Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 3, Sun Xvm Ops Canter 2.1, Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.0 and Sun QFS and the Sun HPC Software Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris.