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.'"

Comments

Re:"We have been somewhat absent..."

[PCM2]

I think when Sun talks about supercomputing it's really talking about HPC/grid-type systems.

FWIW, that's where Sun sees its future. Which makes sense. There's no point trying to compete with Linux for low-end applications (and by "low-end" I mean everything from desktops to simple Web-app servers). Sun has always been good at crafting products for that top 2% of customers who really, really need that high-availability or high-performance component that isn't going to make a difference for the other 98%. And Sun can charge for them.

Re:"We have been somewhat absent..."

[TheRaven64]

Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999? Web app servers. For a lot of web app type workloads, the T1 blows everything away in terms of power per watt and power per dollar.

Blue Gene Vs. Constellation

[flaming-opus]

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.

Re:"We have been somewhat absent..."

[billcopc]

I second that. Sun's product line is very aggressive for SMB gear. They don't stray much into the supercomputing arena because it's a whole other ballgame, but for high-end "common" servers and workstations, they offer some pretty serious bang for the buck. In that light, they compete in the same segments as Dell's Poweredge line, or HP's Proliant. Medium iron as opposed to big iron. Server gear for the rest of us who aren't on the Fortune 50 :)

I fell in love with Sun when I first laid my hands on a Sun Fire V40z, 8 cores of AMD goodness in a small box, but half the price of a competing Dell system.