Sun is taking the Grid to mainstream with the Sun Fire server family

The Sun enterprise edition was announced this month of June 2002. The Sun HPC cluster tools 4 has a scalability to 2048 processes. Mr. Perrenod also stated that the Sun Fire server family has a capacity of up to 106 CPUs SMP with 576 GB in a single cabinet.

Sun aims at taking the grid to mainstream in the Cluster and Campus project. Technical computing portals are provided by the Sun ONE, offering an open integratable HPTC software environment. The company delivers vertical and horizontal scaling by expanding its clustering solutions.

High Performance storage is achieved by performance and utilisation suites (QFS, SAM-FS). Sun equally focuses on high end graphics and visualisation with the XVR 1000 based on a MAJC processor, as Mr. Perrenod explained. This fits into the Sun Blade 1000/2000.

Sun's strategy in HPTC consists of a sustained R&D investment, strategic acquisitions and alliances. The company is a first-tier ISV technology partner for technical computing applications as well as an innovator of Grid computing technologies using the Sun Grid Engine. The market share has grown to 21% in 2001 from 1% in 1998, according to the IDC figures.

Mr. Perrenod promoted the complete solutions environment for storage, systems, integration and visualisation. The Sun One provides an integrated HPTC stack with systems and application administration. There is also the Sun One Studio development environment with compilers and performance tools. In addition, Sun offers a variety of HPC cluster tools.

Mr. Perrenod also mentioned the Global Grid middleware known as Globus AVAKI. With the Sun Grid Engine family, Sun specialises in distributed resource management. And Sun is of course relying on the Solaris operating environment security. The Solaris 9 operating environment offers scalability and performance, next to an improved threading library, and more efficient scaling. Complete C, C++ and Fortran 95 are the language systems for 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Sun has a wide range of customers in different sectors of industry including Cogningen Corporation, Edinburgh University, Ford Motor Company, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and Motorola. Caprion Pharmaceuticals, an expert in bioinformatics and proteomics, uses the Sun Fire servers to discover and develop pharmaceutical products which enhance the quality of life.

Mr. Perrenod was also proud to announce some recent customer successes including the Aachen University of Technology, the Beijing Institute of Genomics, the Boeing Company, and Incyt Genomics, just to cite a few.

Another Sun customer is the RWTH Aachen, a leading technical university which selected a Sun system to replace its outdated vector-based supercomputer. The university will achieve a computational power of four teraflops by 2004. The collaboration with Sun focuses on CFD and VR tools. RWTH chose Sun because their systems are easier to run.

Mr. Perrenod ended his talk with the Sun HPC virtual labs. As such, the University of Durham has a cosmology machine to study the structure of the universe.