Fujitsu Announces 16-core SPARC64 IXfx (and the Supercomputer It Powers)

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx processors, which offer a very significant boost in performance over the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor on which they are based and which power the K computer. Each processor has 16 cores and achieves world-class standalone performance levels of 236.5 gigaflops and performance per watt of over 2 gigaflops." Not that K is any slouch.

Comments

Re:Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

I don't think Oracle is interested in this market. They wanted the subset of Sun hardware that is good for databases and web apps (i.e. the Tx line), but they aren't really interested in being in the general-purpose server market. They want to be able to control the entire stack from the hardware to the applications, and everything in the middle. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that it lets them really tune for performance out of the box. The second, and more important, is that it lets them offer support contracts for the entire machine. If anything goes wrong with it, hardware, operating system, database, or in the business apps, you won't get your in-house IT staff to fix it, you'll just call Oracle. These contracts can be really expensive, and still seem like a good deal compared to keeping a few admins on staff.

Re:Oracle?

[sleigher]

Right, except have you ever called Oracle support? Had a sev 1 recently. We have 24x7x4 hr call back. Did I get a call back after 4 hours? no. 6 hours? no. 8 hours? no. It was 3 days later we actually got a manager to have a meeting with us to figure out why we can't get support for our hardware. Go ahead, get rid of your staff. Depend on Oracle to help you. That's a great idea. I assure you, you will not regret it.