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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.'"
I dearly, dearly hope that the followups to Magnum are codenamed LaTigra and Blue Steel :)
IBM Blue Gene/P update slated to run at 3 petaflops.
Java apps still take 3 minutes to start up on it.
Well if they just move the petaflops out of the way before it gets there, they won't have to worry about it hitting them.
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In Soviet Russia, TFA reads you!
Please tell me the first production system will be named "Enterprise." There have to be enough people that will work on it that will be proponents of this.
We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes
Whoa, slowdown boy, just tell us how many laptop-miles of power this machine has!
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You missed the official rules.
Back in the 1980s, what distinguished the Amiga (and later Steve Job's excellent NeXT) was the ability to split data among multiple co-processors and pipe it quickly around the motherboard, eliminating bottleneck and liberating the processor. Now in the PC world we're finally seeing this architecture recognized as new Intel chips tout their front-side bus and cache more than sheer increase in speed.
This SUN machine is a bigger-scale example of the same. It uses AMD Barcelona chips, and derives its power from internally routing data more efficiently than (most of) its competitors. It seems that in the Moore's-law endgame, what makes the chip a star performer is the surrounding components and their engineering for efficiency.
This will be better for geeks, as it makes the skill of efficient design come back into play after years of "bigger is better." Now if it just extends to software as well, we'll all benefit...
technical writing / development
3,456 ports. Now there's a non-computer number if I've ever seen one. It looks like someone asked, "And just how many ports do we need to be competitive," and someone else just started hitting the number keys in sequence across the top of the keyboard, starting at "3", until either Marketing was happy, or the engineer in charge fainted.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Breakfast served all day!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
...but will it run linux? Yes, of course. Although not as speedy as Solaris...Don't feed the penguins
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
There ya go
If you RTFA you will note that, actually, this particular system is built around the Barcelona architecture (from AMD). It remains to be seen if T2 and later on Rock will really be competative against AMD and Intel.
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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.
Sun is responsible for OpenOffice. I expect OpenOffice to become the premiere office suite on PCs of all sorts any day now.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
...but will it run linux?
The first one of these being built, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, is in fact running Linux, not Solaris (See this Register article). Sun will support both.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously high-performance?
Yep. We are implementing a datawarehouse app and after seeing the poor performance we are getting out of Oracle on Windows for our ERP product we are researching different solutions. Right now Sun is in the lead. They are about 20% less than our Windows solution for the overall solution and we expect it to be more scalable as we will only be partially populating the DB server out of the gate. They claim they can do with 4 middle tier boxes what our Windows solution provider has speced 13 Windows boxes for. I can't wait to see the results of the bakeoff. I'm primarily a Windows/Citrix guy but I've admin'd Solaris and Linux in past and I won't ming keeping my Solaris skills up to date if it's the best solution =)
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