HPCwire: Sun's Supercomputer Rises in the East

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July 14, 2006

Sun's Supercomputer Rises in the East

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In May, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), one of the world's premier science and technology universities, installed a 38-teraflops supercomputer, based on Sun Fire Server technology. Tokyo Tech's supercomputer, called TSUBAME, represents Sun's largest high performance computing win to date. The system also represents the largest supercomputer outside the United States. It includes 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores, more than 21 terabytes of memory and 1.1 petabytes of hard disk storage.

IDC's Earl Joseph recently completed an exclusive interview for HPCwire with Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, of the Tokyo Tech's Global Scientific Information and Computing Center. Professor Matsuoka talks about the significance of the new TSUBAME system and describes some of the cutting-edge applications that will be running on it.

HPCwire: What's the status of the Sun system?

Matsuoka: The Sun system was installed in March 2006. When the Sun boxes arrived in mass, the infrastructure was already in place, so the installation went quickly, one of the fastest installations ever of such a large system. On April 3, we were able to start the service on a limited number of nodes. We did preliminary Linpack runs on the whole system in early May. In early June, about 5,000 processors, or half of the system, was opened up for public use. We were reserving the other 5,000 processors for benchmarking and special allocations.

The user workload has been growing steadily and is already at 70 percent. We're now running hundreds of jobs on the system. We're receiving help desk mail from all of the university departments we serve. Many users are telling us they love the new system. Some users are starting to do massive runs. One of these, for example, is looking at scenarios with avian flu and the impact of potential social policy decisions. This is a parameter study.

HPCwire: How difficult was the installation?

Matsuoka: Based on our prior experiences bringing up large computers, the glitches we've faced with this Sun system have been quite minor. We're currently stress-testing the machine around the clock. There have been no major complaints. It's just been an amazingly quick ramp-up to stable operation. After just a few weeks, failures were minor and very sporadic.

HPCwire: Were there any surprises?

Matsuoka: There are always a couple. Staying with fat nodes turned out to be a good strategic move. With a small node system of this size, we would have had to manage 10,000 thin nodes. With fat nodes, the number is only 655, which is not all that different from the scale we have been used to. The other surprise is how much attention we are getting because of this system.

HPCwire: I've been hearing a lot lately about the issue of power consumption on large-scale HPC systems. How has your new system affected power consumption at your center?

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