After the release of Intel's highly anticipated Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 processor family, a number of PC vendors have updated their server and workstation offerings with the latest generation of Intel processors. It now appears that Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems has also decided to officially announce its latest blade servers, rack servers and workstations, specifically designed to leverage Intel's Nehalem-based Xeon processors. According to Sun, these latest solutions, including integrated open storage and high-performance networking, have been designed to bring simplicity and cost savings to the HPC market. With the announcement, Sun also unveiled its next-generation Sun Constellation system, designed to power some of the world's largest HPC systems.

“Slow pipes and slow storage have limited high performance computing systems for years. The solution is to evolve the industry's view of high performance computing today to include high performance I/O and networking,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Our Open Network Systems approach first solved this problem with the Sun Constellation System. Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges.”

One of Sun's latest products comes in the form of the new Sun Blade X6275, a dual-node server module that is presented as the first blade server to deliver on-board IB QDR, offering improved network performance, power efficiency and ease of use. The server is encased in a Sun Blade 6048 chassis and boasts two Intel Xeon 5500-series processors, up to 96GB of high-speed memory, Gigabit Ethernet, optional Sun Flash Modules and optional PCIe ExpressModule I/O. The solution can enable up to nine teraFLOPS of peak performance in a single 42U rack.

In addition, Sun also rolled out its new Sun Constellation System, expected to be used in some of the world's largest HPC systems. A list of the company's customers includes names such as Australian National University (ANU), Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), the Galileu Project and the University of Zurich, all of which have decided to go for Sun's latest Constellation System.