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Sun Super Computer May Hit 2 Petaflops
Fletcher writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has revealed their "Constellation System", a new supercomputing platform that the company hopes will put them back in the running for top dog in the supercomputer race. "The linchpin in the system is the switch, the piece of hardware that conducts traffic between the servers, memory and data storage. Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these powerful computers. 'We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes," said Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We have been somewhat absent in the supercomputer market in the last few years.'"
Great job Sun!
Once again you have shown us the power of talent, determination, and skill.
Rock Rock On!
So Bechtolsheim says Sun has been "somewhat absent" from the supercomputer market in the last few years. OK, I'll bite. Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999?
Still, kudos to Sun, for real. Investors may get mad that Sun is full of terrific technology and solid R&D but can't seem to build the business model that will let Sun capitalize on it all. But from my perspective... God, that sounds almost refreshing, doesn't it?
Breakfast served all day!
With Sun's slow improvements in the multi-core arena (the T1 & T2 systems) and their low power requirements their probably in for a good run at the top 10-20 spots on the Top 500 list.
:)
Consider 500 top-end T2 systems hooked up to some very fast switching hardware and you're performance per wattage ratio are going to be very persuasive to those running big data centers, although with the T1 systems the only thing which stopped us adopting them was the shared FPU (telephony codec transcoding sucks on them).
Could we see suns equivalent of IBM's BlueGene system appearing next year? I definitely think so
yeah, there are a lot of systems out there with theoretical limits of several petaflops. Cray, IBM, NEC, even SGI have systems that could theoretically hit several PFlops if you had enough money.
I'm waiting to see a customer actually purchase one, and for it to be installed, and actually running customer code, before I really care.
Bechtolsheim compares 131,000 cores of Blue Gene/L to 131,000 cores of constellation, with the sun system offering 3 times the performance.
This is hardly a fair comparison. IBM installed a 131,000 core BG/L 2 years ago, and it's been running customer code for more than a year. The sun system won't be built until late this year, and probably won't be running real customer code until this time next year. Furthermore, the BG/L machine is designed with a low-power node, assuming that a larger number of cores would be used. In IBM's older BG/L design, there are 2048 cores in a rack. Sun is packing 768 opteron cores in a rack. So a per square-meter measure gives IBM's 3 year old design only a 20% disadvantage to Sun's not-yet-released machine.
All of that is moot, of course, as theoretical peak performance is a crappy way to measure supercomputer performance anyway. The opteron is a great processor, and infinaband is a decent, though not remarkable interconnect. I'd be a little concerned, were I to buy the sun solution, that the infinaband bandwidth is being shared by 16 processor cores. That's quite a bit less interconnect performance per processor than IBM's Blue Gene, power5, Cray's XT, or SGI's altix. There's certainly plenty of memory on each of these constellation blades. That said, there are a list of applications that perform very well on Blue Gene, and Sun has a lot of ground to make up in terms of OS, software, and establishing a relationship with the HPC customers.
It's nice to have more options, however.