HPCwire: Canadian Research Lab Turns to Sun Microsystems for Compute Cluster

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June 10, 2008

Canadian Research Lab Turns to Sun Microsystems for Compute Cluster

HPCVL relies on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers running Solaris 10 to keep up with growing need for high performance computing capacity

SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 10 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., today announced that High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) in Canada has selected Sun to power Victoria Falls, its new compute cluster based on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). HPCVL selected the Sun platform for its reliable, secure computing environment as well as its capability to scale dynamically, with little difficulty and with lower total cost of ownership. At full capacity, the Sun-powered Victoria Falls HPC cluster is designed to process nearly 10,000 threads simultaneously. To take advantage of special offers and promotions for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server, including Sun's Try and Buy program, visit: http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy.

"As a long time customer of Sun for HPC expertise and solutions, it was natural for us to look to Sun's latest technology to keep up with the growing demands from our increasing user and application base," said Dr. Ken Edgecombe, executive director, HPCVL. "With the type of growth we are seeing we needed to look at the best HPC platform out there and be able to introduce new technologies. The CMT technology built into the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server has enabled us to help some of our 600+ researchers begin to use the new multi-threaded, multi-core technologies and prepare to scale rapidly to support the massive workload on the servers. We are seeing scaling even better than expected as we continue to see application demand increase."

"The big problem that customers with compute-intensive applications are facing today is an ever increasing need for scalability in data centers that are rapidly running out of space," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, systems marketing, Sun Microsystems. "HPCVL's use of the SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers clearly demonstrates the extreme scalability and efficiencies Sun's CMT servers deliver versus commodity x86 boxes. We're talking 32x the density in a single rack unit."

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server with its chip multi-threading technology delivers breakthrough performance and scalability enabling customers to consolidate HPC, web and datacenter applications into an ultra-dense, energy efficient compute environment -- making it ideal for the build-out of a scaleable computing infrastructure. Consisting of 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers, the new compute cluster greatly expands HPCVL's current compute capacity and helps meet the growing needs of HPCVL's user base while continuing to deliver to them a highly available and secure user experience at a cost lower than competitive systems.

HPC codes well suited for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 include applications that require high levels of parallelization and/or very high memory bandwidth.

HPCVL's users have also been able to quickly identify which user applications perform best on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and optimize their code for the CMT architecture with Sun's CoolTools suite of tools. For more information on Sun CoolTools: http://cooltools.sunsource.net/.

For more information on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server, go to http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5140/.

For a look into Sun's current HPC portfolio, visit http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/index.jsp.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

About High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL)

HPCVL is a $160 million public/private collaboration for research and innovation. Public funding is provided by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund (ORF), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT), and the federal Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). In addition to reliable, secure computing, HPCVL provides storage resources and support for over 130 Canadian research groups, comprising some 600 researchers, working in a variety of fields. Additional information on HPCVL can be found at http://hpcvl.org.

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Source: Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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