The Sun Constellation System brings key innovations to market and is designed for radical simplicity that puts a new level of HPC within reach for customers. The system combines ultra-dense, high-performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics. Based on proven, open industry standard technologies and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Sun's HPC solutions can quickly scale to allow for rapid deployment and faster time-to-results than competing HPC solutions. Customers who use Sun's HPC offerings have achieved capital expenditure savings of 30 percent, improved energy consumption by 70 percent, and improved time-to-results by as much as 75 percent.

"Sun Constellation System provides customers with the most open HPC architectures existing in the market today", stated Bjorn Andersson, Director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. "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."

Designed for complex applications such as climate, weather and ocean modelling, researchers can use the Sun Constellation System to test next-generation weather forecast codes with long-term climate modelling. Researchers can also run earthquake and seismic simulations with higher resolutions and more accurate modelling of wave propagation to gain further insight into earthquake scenarios.

Univa has joined Sun's Partner Advantage Programme and the Partner Community for HPC. Under an OEM agreement, Univa will package Sun Grid Engine as the Distributed Resource Manager with its Globus Cluster Edition. This agreement expands on the existing Sun-Univa relationship to enable Sun and Univa's customers to deploy complete HPC solutions with integrated, best-of-breed, open source components, with full support from both Univa and Sun.

In addition to previewing the Sun Constellation System at ISC, Sun will be showcasing a range of exciting demos and innovation, including:

• Sun Fire X4600 M2 server with double the memory, giving customers 1/4 terabyte of memory in a 4U server.
• Project BlackBox, one of the world's first virtualized datacentre for quick deployment and efficient operation.
• Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 software, an integrated parallel development environment based on the Open MPI source code enabling customers to run complex, compute-intensive applications on Sun systems.
• Network.com (Sun Grid), an Application Catalog backed by substantial on-line resources, offering on-demand delivery of HPC applications without the need to architect, install or reconfigure HPC environments.
• Sun Studio 12 software, a compiler and tools software for both the Solaris 10 OS and GNU/Linux platforms empowering developers to take full advantage of recent advances in multi-core and multithreading applications.
• Sun Grid Engine 6.1 software (released May 8th, 2007), providing policy-based workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workloads. (A preview of the upcoming new Advanced Reservation feature is available via the open source Grid Engine project.)
• Complete lifecycle management via Sun Connection services, helping network managers discover, provision, patch and monitor thousands of compute nodes.
• Sun HPC Quick Start Services, making it easy for customers to adopt, implement and optimize HPC solutions-with deployment time savings of up to 80%.