Sun and Boeing launch HPC storage area network pilotPalo alto 16 July 2001 SUN has been conducting a pilot program with The Boeing Company to deploy Sun's new iForce High Performance Computing (HPC) Storage Area Network (SAN) solution. The HPC SAN is the first dedicated high-speed storage network suited to the HPC and Technical Computing environments, enabling efficient, high-speed data storage and access across heterogeneous computing platforms. With the HPC SAN solution, customers benefit from increased efficiency, cost savings and faster product and solution development.
HPC and Technical Computing performance depends on the speed at which data
is acquired, processed and distributed, but traditional HPC systems hinder
the process by attaching separate storage to each computational platform.
As a result, storage systems are expensive, redundant and difficult to
manage and expand.
The Sun HPC SAN is the first to replace this architecture with a single,
efficient system for simultaneous storage and data access across
a wide range of computing platforms. As a result, users eliminate the
costs of hardware redundancy and create products and solutions
more quickly through efficient processing and sharing of data. In
addition, the system establishes a single point of data, file system
and storage administration, for easier overall management and expansion.
In trials, Suns HPC SAN system demonstrated extremely impressive efficiency
over 90% at the high data rates typical of HPC environments.
Deployed with a 2.4 GB/second input/output bandwidth between computing
platforms and the SAN, the system sustained data movement of over
2.2 GB per second.
The Boeing pilot program is being conducted at numerous Boeing sites, where
Sun has supported Boeing through a number of projects. Using
HPC SAN and Suns new Sunfire 6800 line of systems, the team plans to
demonstrate data input and output greater than 2.2 GB/second, and to
continue to increase speed, efficiency and scale. The pilot will also
verify fail-over testing of the metadata controller and the proven
fiber optic tape archiving functionality.
The Sun HPC SAN is suited to multiple markets with high volumes of data
processing and computing demands, including biosciences,
scientific research and development, rich media and oil and gas. For
example, with recent advancements in genomics, biomedical research
requires increasingly computationally-intense computing with vast amounts
of data being processed and shared between researchers; and to
create high-tech movie special effects, multiple technicians need to
manipulate and share images, of which a single second of film can
represent up to two gigabytes of data.
Sun's iForce HPC SAN solution is one of a growing number
of solutions available as part of the company's iForce
initiative. Through its iForce program, Sun works with its best-in-class
iForce partner community to deliver customer-driven solutions
that solve business problems and help customers reduce risk and
time-to-service. Customers can conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations
using the HPC SAN solution in Suns Customer Benchmarking Center in
Beaverton, Oregon. Between February and May of this year, nine
companies from the fields of aerospace, government, IT and systems
integration, previewed the technology in Beaverton, and all agreed
that the speed and functionality is superior.
An established leader in collaborative approaches to supercomputing, Sun
has recently doubled its share of the HPC market, making HPC a
$1.2 billion business for the company.
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