14 DAY TRIAL // This is probably the third news related to the supercomputer design I've come across in the latest 24 hours. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for really big systems but this is too much. Because only a day after IBM announced its Blue Gene/P design capable to scale up to 3 petaflops, Sun also issued a press release related to the launch of its newest supercomputer.
Called "Constellation", the newest CPU mayhem is a direct result of the collaboration between Sun and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. Tech-wise, the Constellation is made up out of 6,576 quad-core AMD Opterons providing 26,304 processing cores paired with 52.6TB of RAM.
The system will later expand to 1,302 processors providing 52,608 cores and 105TB RAM and with those cores it will be able to produce a computational index of about 2 petaflops. Currently the base combination can only produce about 421 teraflops but the expansion process will happen very soon.
According to Sun officials, the newest supercomputer "combines ultra-dense, high-performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics."
Regarding the importance of Constellation, Bjorn Andersson, Director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems claimed: "Sun Constellation System provides customers with the most open HPC architectures existing in the market today. Bringing OpenSolaris and other open source software to the forefront of the HPC market, Sun is ushering in a new era of HPC computing. For customers, this means being able to now leverage the reliability and security of the Solaris 10 OS coupled with the massive scalability of the Sun Constellation System."
Just as any other supercomputer, the future Constellation will be able to run very complex modeling and simulation software such as climate, weather and ocean modeling. Next generation weather forecast codes with very accurate climate scenarios could be instantly rendered by such a device. The only problem is Blue Gene/P could prove faster. That's not good for Sun but it's great for AMD since they will have a 3rd supercomputer based on their CPUs on the Top10 Supercomputers. For a quick comparison, INTEL only has one system in the Top10 and it currently holds the No.8 spot. Nice going, AMD!
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