IBM, Sun square up in supercomputer market

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 27 June 2007 07:24

Your IT - Home IT

Sun's Constellation has the potential to deliver two petaflops - enough to beat IBM's Blue Gene/L, and probably sufficient to take second place behind the new Blue Gene/P. Previewed at this week's International Supercomputing Conference in Germany, deliveries will begin next year.

Constellation can be configured with UltraSPARC TI, Opteron or Xeon processors. A key feature is a high-density 3456-port InfiniBand switch which - compared with using multiple smaller switches - reduces the cabling required and provides consistent latency. The system runs Sun's Solaris 10 operating system with the Sun Grid Engine for workload management and dynamic provisioning.

Like IBM, Sun sees its supercomputer as being applicable to commercial applications such as data mining and transaction processing as well as the traditional scientific and technical markets for high performance computers (HPC).

"On the commercial side, there's a marriage between the traditional HPC requirements of research with requirements usually associated with mainstream data centres," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC systems at Sun. "The Sun Constellation System meets this need for production-ready HPC at petascale."

The first petascale Constellation system is the Ranger HPC cluster at the University of Texas, Austin. When completed, its 15,000 quad-core CPUs will deliver over 0.5 petaflops.

A major difference between the two companies approaches is that Sun has opted to use standard components that can be part of large or small clusters.

"The secret sauce is in innovation at the system level and how we put everything together," said Andersson. "It enables us to radically reduce the amount of complexity for petascale level clusters, making them easier to deploy and manage, and more efficient to own and operate."