Sun has introduced a family of integrated servers, storage and
networking for high performance computing. The product can be
configured for
supercomputing applications like weather modelling and
forecasting, high energy and nuclear physics, molecular dynamics
calculations and seismic processing.
The company has combined its dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server
module, powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, with its
Blade 6048 InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) Network Express
Module (NEM). The product includes Sun's Blade 6048 chassis,
the Sun Cooling Door system, the Lustre file system and Sun's Open
Storage portfolio.
Sun says its HPC networking family reduces cabling by 84%,
switches by 97%, and rack space by 75%.
The fully configured product is able to support 48 physical
blades per rack - supporting 96 nodes of two-socket, quad-core
processors per node, resulting in a total of 768 processor cores
and nine teraflops of peak performance in a single 42U rack using
the Sun Blade X6275 blade. Sun said the configuration provides up
to 2.25 teraflops of peak compute capacity and a Linpack efficiency
rating of 89% for every shelf of 12 blades.