Sun Microsystems - HPC Solutions

HPC Solutions

Sun marketed the Sun Constellation System for High-Performance Computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were in use in many of the TOP500 systems and supercomputing centers:

• Lustre – used by 7 of the top 10 supercomputers in 2008, as well as other industries that need high-performance storage: 6 major oil companies (including BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil), chip-design (including Synopsys and Sony), and the movie-industry (including Harry Potter and Spider-Man).
• Sun Fire X4500 – used by high energy physics supercomputers to run dCache
• Sun Grid Engine – a popular workload scheduler for clusters and computer farms
• Sun Visualization System – allows users of the TeraGrid to remotely access the 3D rendering capabilities of the Maverick system at the University of Texas at Austin
• Sun Modular Datacenter (Project Blackbox) – two Sun MD S20 units are used by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

The Sun HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to Open MPI, and donated engineering resources to the Open MPI project.

Sun was a participant in the OpenMP language committee. Sun Studio compilers and tools implemented the OpenMP specification for shared memory parallelization.

In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in 2007. Ranger had a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and was the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2008. Sun announced an OpenSolaris distribution that integrated many of Sun's HPC products and other 3rd-party solutions.