New infrastructure for high-performance computing

Many Government Economic Stimulation packages are also contributing to the growth as financial support is accelerating adoption for future economic benefit.

High-performance computing (HPC) has also reached a turning point which has expanded its uses. As a result it is no longer all about server compute power.

Today's HPC environments run more frequent and more complex simulations that absorb and produce increasing amounts of data.

For example, users are utilising HPC environments to conduct DNA research, for crash testing as well as complex weather and financial simulations. All of which require greater amounts of data to conduct sophisticated models and analysis programs.

Combine this with the need to share data across the globe and the result is an HPC environment that requires higher storage capacity with low latency and higher I/O throughput rates.

Traditional storage solutions and special purpose HPC storage appliances are not designed for mass data growth and as a result are becoming too costly to support the requirements.

In addition, many HPC sites need to hold this data for a long period of time. In cases where multiple terabytes of data are generated every month it is very costly to store without a dedicated low cost storage solution such as tape.

Sun HPC helps control data growth

Companies wanting to deploy an HPC solution for simulations are consequently much more concerned with exploding data volumes, space, power and cooling costs.

Sun can help HPC customers deploy an environment that optimises performance, incorporates the required storage and keeps cost down.

Sun Constellation System - the world's first open petascale computing environment combines ultra-dense high-performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity, and breakthrough economics.

Sun Compute Cluster - Optimised for smaller environments, Sun Compute Cluster is designed to handle your most computationally intense business problems. This integrated system comes ready to deploy and is massively scalable.

Sun Lustre Storage System - based on the Lustre parallel file system and Sun Open Storage products, the Sun Lustre Storage System shatters I/O bottlenecks, providing very high bandwidth, extreme scalability, and massive capacity.

Sun HPC solutions deliver:

• Compute-intensive workloads - run faster, more efficiently
• Systems scale to over 2 Petaflops - with reduced complexity
• Complete storage portfolio - simplifies data management, cuts costs
• Business ready HPC optimised industry solutions

With Sun, customers can improve eco-efficiency by providing energy-efficient, space-saving archive solutions. Sun's HPC solutions also utilise flash technology that maintains high I/O rates in order take full advantage of Sun's infrastrcuture.

Sun's offerings can help customers improve application performance without adding more disk drives or servers to the HPC environment, in order to reduce infrastructure requirements in the data centre. And therefore keep costs down.

Technologies to deliver HPC

Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch - reduces the cost and complexity of large-scale HPC solutions. This high-density, Quad Data Rate (QDR) IB core switch offers unrivaled capacity for up to 648 servers and storage systems while delivering extremely low latency and breakthrough economics.

Sun HPC Software - provides reliability and scalability in a cost-effective package to maximise cluster performance, easily manage your complex infrastructure, and quickly get your system up and running.

Flash Technology - enables acceleration of hot data files, avoidance of overbuying disks for performance, and reduces the need for installing large memory pools in compute nodes.

Lustre File System - designed to meet the demands of the world's largest high-performance compute clusters, Lustre redefines scalability and provides groundbreaking I/O and metadata throughput.

Sun Grid Engine - the world's most widely deployed distributed resource manager. The Sun Grid Engine software supports extreme scalability, simplifies administration and supports a diverse set of use case scenarios. It has industry-leading reliability and offers fast ROI.

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System: architected using open storage principles, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems provide superb ease of use, scaling, and high-performance data-sharing for HPC clusters.