Sun claims Starfire outperforms Origin 2000 and AlphaServer 8400 cluster

Palo Alto, 12 November 97 SUN claims that, according to a Linpack benchmark test, the single node Sun Starfire outperforms the 64 CPU (195 Mhz) SGI Origin 2000 and the 64 CPU (440 Mhz) Digital AlphaServer 8400 cluster. The test results show that the single node Sun HPC 10000 server, configured with 64 UltraSPARC II (250 Mhz) CPUs, 4 Mbyte second-level cache, 16 Gbyte of memory and 63 Gbyte of Sun RSM Array 2000 storage, delivered 26.45 Gflop/s with a matrix size of 19,968 (Nmax) and achieved 82.7% of peak CPU performance.

A four-node Sun HPC 10000 cluster demonstrated 100.4 Gflops for the Highly Parallel Computing version of the Linpack benchmark with a matrix size of 80,640 (Nmax). Results for the clustered system were achieved using 256 UltraSPARC II (250 Mhz) CPUs, each with 4 Mbytes second-level cache, running the Solaris 2.6 operating environment. The systems were configured with 16 Gbytes of memory and 63 Gbytes of Sun RSM Array 2000 storage. These results delivered 78% of peak theoretical performance with a cluster solution.

Linpack benchmarks are a set of tests, emphasizing floating point addition and multiplication, that measure performance for solving linear equations used in scientific and engineering environments. There are multiple metrics for each Linpack benchmark, which define performance expectations and testing limitations. Sun's results for the Highly Parallel Version of the Linpack benchmark have been submitted to and audited by Jack Dongarra, creator of the Linpack benchmark.

Sun's HPC server family is a line of seven high-performance SMP systems. The Sun HPC servers range in size from a two-processor Sun HPC 2 system to the 64-processor HPC 10000 system.

Sandra Wermer