Sun Supercomputer awarded $59 Million Dollar Contract, Look out IBM Blue Gene
Sun is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM’s Blue Gene courtesy of a US$59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design.
The design provides 21 million floating point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 petaflops. IBM already has a 3-petaflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the number two spot.
Sun’s Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, alongside other supercomputers, and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD’s forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.
The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.
The benefit of a big switch is that inter-switch cables –needed if smaller switches were used — can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it’s cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also says that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.
It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.
