14 DAY TRIAL // Sun Microsystems, Inc. systems announced today that it leads the Top 500 supercomputer list created by the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) with its Tsubame - a supercomputer which is said to be one of the fastest in Asia, appearing for the first time on the 7th place. Tsubame uses 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores in Sun Fire Server x64(x86,64-bit) systems.
Tsubame is Sun's largest HPC deal to date and is also one of the fastest supercomputers outside of the United States, as measured by the sustained Linpack performance of 38.18 trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS), in June 2006.
"It is quite remarkable for us to appear on the TOP500 at such a high place, given that Tsubame was installed in just three weeks and became operational on April 1st," said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor responsible for the Computing Infrastructures at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech, where the machine is installed and operated. "Moreover, it has run Linpack for over 11 hours, which is the longest of any machine on the TOP500 list, demonstrating its utmost stability and the reliability for a supercomputer of this magnitude."
Furthermore, according to analyst research firm IDC, Sun's x86 technical server unit shipments grew 52.6% year-over-year from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006. It seems that Sun was #1 in technical server unit shipments in Q1 CY2006 with more than 19,000 units shipped.
Sun's partners were AMD and NEC, as AMD offers one of the highest performing x64 processor and industry-leading multi-core technology, and NEC, the primary systems integrator, is leading the design of the infrastructure as well as the integration of the various applications which will run on the system, based on the company's experience in building and managing ultra-scale HPC systems.
"Working together, Sun and Tokyo Tech were able to implement one of the largest supercomputers in less than a month, which is virtually unheard of in the industry," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "It's incredible to see how Sun's innovative supercomputing technologies can help HPC customers such as Tokyo Tech break new avenues in research and education."
Sun's system also incorporates technology from ClearSpeed Technology Inc., ClusterFS, and Voltaire into the Tokyo Tech system. ClearSpeed Advance Boards installed in the system will be used in the future to accelerate commonly used scientific algorithms.
On the other hand, ClusterFS's Lustre parallel filesystem software allows the servers to communicate with the storage in parallel, speeding access to the ever increasing amounts of scientific data being processed. In addition, Voltaire is supplying high speed multi-protocol Infiniband switches and host card adapters to connect both the servers and storage
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