Sun Adds Low-End Constellation Switch, New Quad-Socket Blade

Tag : sun switch

One of the most technically sophisticated and elegant high-endsupercomputer designs to come out of anywhere in the past decade is Sun Microsystems ' Constellation System, which has a massive InfiniBand switch,dubbed "Magnum," designed by Sun at the heart of a clustered serverand storage setup that can scale to over 2 petaflops ofnumber-crunching power. This week, Sun set its sights a littlelower and announced a much less scalable switch to chase themidrange HPC and commercial clustering customer bases.
The new switch, called "Nano Magnum" and sold as the DatacenterSwitch 3X24, is the baby brother of the Magnum switch. Sun isshowing it off at the International Supercomputing Conference inDresden, Germany, this week. The Nano Magnum has 72 InfiniBandports (three independent boards in the box) that support DDR 4Xports; this is a lot smaller, obviously, than the Magnum switch,which has 3,456 ports. (Multiple Magnum switches are daisy-chainedtogether to hook up to 13,824 blades and storage into a 2 petaflopscluster.) The Nano Magnum fits in a 1U chassis, and they can alsobe daisy chained as a modest blade cluster grows, up to a total of288 blade nodes.
The new switch is designed to be mounted in pairs atop the midrangeSun Blade 6048 blade chassis, and to round out the departmental HPCsystem, Sun also this week announced the Sun Blade X6450 bladeserver, a variant of the existing X8450 quad-socket blade serverthat it announced in February for the larger Sun Blade 8000chassis. Both blades are based on Intel 's dual-core "Tulsa" Xeon 7100 or quad-core "Tigerton" Xeon 7300processors. The X6450 blade has 24 memory slots, and support 2 GB,4 GB, or 8 GB DIMMs for a maximum of 192 GB of main memory forthose four sockets to share. The blade has two Gigabit Ethernetports, and four PCI-Express busses (two x8 and two x4, linked backto the PCI-Express midplane, which in turn links to peripherals.)With the X6450 blades, Sun can cram 768 Xeon cores in a rack,delivering 7.37 teraflops of computing power.
Sun is supporting Solaris 10 Update 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and 5.0, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 and 10 SP1, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2 on the X6450; VMware 's ESX Server 3.0.2 and 3.5 hypervisors are also supported. Thebase X6450 blade costs $8,655; the configuration for that price wasnot available at press time.
The other announcement that Sun made at ISC this week was that ithas been developing an integrated Solaris or Linux operating systempre-integrated with the Lustre file system (which Sun acquired lastyear), Grid Engine, and other HPC-related tools, which is to becalled the Sun HPC Software stack. The Linux Edition 1.0 waslaunched at ISC 2008. Sun also updated Grid Engine (for gridding upservers and desktops) with a 6.2 release and HPC Cluster Tools (forMPI interconnections) with an 8.0 release.

RELATED STORIES
Sun Delivers Four-Socket, Quad-Core Xeon X8450 Blade Server
Sun Puts Some Numbers on Its Constellation System
Sun Merges Storage Back into Systems Group
Sun Gets Serious (Finally) About Supercomputing
Sun Broadens Its Blade Server Lineup
Sun's X64-Based Streaming Server Runs on Linux
Sun Gets 400 Teraflops Supercomputing Deal with Galaxy Servers
Sun Aspires to Have a Bigger HPC Business
Cray, IBM, Sun Split Phase Two of $146 Million DARPA Super Deal

Post this story to del.icio.us
Post this story to Digg
Post this story to Slashdot