Sun Fire 15K Server is the successor of the Starfire E10000Kircheim-Heimstätten 25 September 2001 Sun Microsystems informed the German HPC specialists in parallel to the New York presentation about the Sun Fire E15K server, the long expected successor of its top-Model the E10000. It is an SMP system (symmetric multiprocessor) with up to 106 UltraSPARC III+ CPUs with 900 MHz clock rate. The memory can be expanded to up to 576 GByte, more than half a TeraByte. The peak performance can be estimated wit 190 GFlop/s.
The Sun
Fire E15K can be equipped with up to 106 UltraSPARC III+
CPUs with 900 MHz clock rate, ECC protected. Each processor has
32 KB instruction and 64 KB data on chip -level 1 cache and 8 MB
external, level 2 cache, both are ECC protected. Sun has
prepared room for 9 slots for processor and memory boards on
both sides of the machine. Thus it sums up to 18 boards. Each
board contains four CPUs and 32 GByte of memory. In total there
are 72 processors and 576 GByte memory. Under them Sun installs
in total 72 hot-swappable PCI slots for input/output. Four of
these PCI slots can be used for one Max-CPU-Board, which
contains two CPUs without memory. Thus the user can expand the
machine up to these 106 processors but then has only four PCI
slots for I/O. Sun believes that an HPC application does not has
severe I/O and thinks that four PCI slots are sufficient.
The processors and the system communicate via the redundant,
twofold realised Sun Fireplane. It is a modified 18x18 Crossbar
Interconnect with a 150 MHz clock and a sustained bandwidth of
43.26 GByte/s and a sustained I/O bandwidth of 21.6 GByte/s, 2.4
GByte/s per I/O board peak.
The Sun Fire E15K can be divided into 18 domains which are
separated from each other. Thus it is not possible that one
domain can communicate with an other via the system controller.
They are totally and automatically reconfigurable during the
operation of an application. By separating the CPU/memory boards
from the I/O boards - the PCI slots - it is possible to arrange
the domains following the needs of an application. An I/O
intensive application can use more PCI slots, the domain gets
additional ones
One of the most important design targets was RAS, reliability,
availability and serviceability. The hardware is redundant, CPUs
can be exchanged during the operation of the system. A lot of
components are in multiple pieces available, power supply,
ventilators and system controllers. Following Sun, the PCI slots
and the CPU/memory boards are hot swappable. There are two
system controllers, if one fails, the system automatically fails
over and thus there is no interrupt in the operation.
The CPU/memory boards based on the Ultra SPARC III+ can be built
in in the whole Sun Fire series, 3800 bis 6800. In the future
they can be exchanged against the coming Ultra SPARC IV
Generation with a planned clock rate of 1.5 GHz. As this
computer wil be used in data centres, there are no internal,
local disks, except for the system controllers. Sun has added in
an early stage 250 TB disk space using its own Sun StorEdge
solution. The fully configured Sun Fire E15K's dimensions are:
weight 1 ton (2.200 lb), heigth 191 cm (74.75 in.), width 85 cm
(33.25 in.) and depth 166 cm (65 in.).
An initial system with 48 processors was running at Sun
Microsystems' German/European sales office in
Kirchheim-Heimstetten near Munich.
Uwe Harms |
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