Aspen
NCSA
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Sun Sets Records with New x64 Server


Sun Fire X4640 server is fastest x64 system for enterprise and technical applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 8 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced its new Sun Fire X4640 server, based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivered outstanding performance on industry-standard benchmarks. These results highlight the enterprise-class performance and significant infrastructure and management cost savings Sun's integrated infrastructure with the Solaris Operating System (OS) deliver through the convergence of compute, networking and storage.

The new Sun Fire X4640 server uses up to eight Six-Core AMD Opteron processors in 4RU, making it the most compact 24- to 48-core system available from tier one vendors. With up to 65 percent better performance than the previous generation Sun Fire X4600M2 server(1) and up to half a terabyte of memory in 64 memory slots, the Sun Fire X4640 server helps customers increase data center efficiency and is an exemplary platform for enterprise databases and HPC applications as well as virtualization and consolidation. The Sun Fire X4640 server supports the Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems and VMware, Solaris Containers and Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization. For more information on the Sun Fire X4640 server visit sun.com/x4640 and for Sun's full line of x64 servers, visit http://www.sun.com/x64.

The benchmark results announced today are:

Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark -- The Sun Fire X4640 server with eight AMD Opteron processors (48 cores, 48 threads) delivered an outstanding x86 Unicode-based result and set an eight-processor world record with 10,000 SAP SD Benchmark users running the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode)(2). The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments and demonstrates the performance of systems running sell-from-stock workloads. The outstanding result achieved on the latest Unicode version of the benchmark demonstrates the advantage of deploying the Sun Fire X4640 server and Solaris OS for customers looking to gain seamless multilingual support with SAP applications.

Versus the competition on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, the Sun Fire X4640 server running SAP solutions with Oracle Database on top of the Solaris 10 OS, delivered:

  • 21 percent better performance than an eight-processor HP ProLiant DL785 G6 system that utilized faster CPUs and ran the Windows OS(3)
  • 33 percent better performance than a 16-processor NEC Express 5800 server(4)
  • 2.7x the performance of a four-processor IBM System 550 server(5)

SPECompL2001 -- The Sun Fire X4640 server with eight AMD Opteron model 8435 processors running the Solaris 10 10/09 OS with Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software, posted the top x86 result on SPECompL2001(6). The SPEC OMP benchmark represents workloads often used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry and mechanical design, and consists of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer's processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation. Running parallel applications with 48 compute threads and half a terabyte of memory, the Sun Fire X4640 server is well suited for memory intensive, technical workloads and extends Solaris OS and Sun Studio leadership in the OpenMP space using x86 architectures.

Details on the outstanding results announced today and other world records are available at http://www.sun.com/benchmarks.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) 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.

1) Results of the Sun Fire X4600M2 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads) running Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 6,050 SAP SD Benchmark users; 33,230 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009022.

2) Results of the Sun Fire X4640 (8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads) running Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 10,000 SAP SD Benchmark users; 55,070 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009049.

3) Results of the HP DL 785 (8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads) running Windows OS, Microsoft SQL server, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 8,280 SAP SD Benchmark users; 45,350 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009035.

4) Results of the NEC Express 5800 (16 processors / 96 cores / 96 threads) running Windows OS, Microsoft SQL server, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 7,500 SAP SD Benchmark users; 41,070 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009016.

5) Results of the IBM System 550 (4 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads) running AIX 6.1, DB2 9.5, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark users; 20,520 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009023.

6) SPEC and the benchmark name SPEComp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from this announcement and www.spec.org, as of 12/06/09. Sun Fire X4640 server (8 chips, 48 cores, 48 OMP threads) 381,017 SPECompLpeak2001.

-----

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sponsored Links

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

Webinar: Programming Heterogeneous X64+GPU Systems Using OpenACC
Join Michael Wolfe as he compares the advantages and costs of using both low-level models and the directive-based OpenACC model for programming accelerated heterogeneous systems. Registration is free.

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

May 23, 2013

May 22, 2013

May 21, 2013

May 20, 2013

May 17, 2013

May 16, 2013

May 15, 2013

May 14, 2013

May 13, 2013

May 10, 2013


Most Read Features

Most Read Around the Web

Most Read This Just In

Cray CS300-LC

Feature Articles

Exascale Advocates Stand on Nuclear Stockpiles

In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...

NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs

In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...

CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives

Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...

Short Takes

NASA Builds 'Climate in a Box'

May 23, 2013 | The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...

Building Supercomputers with Raspberries

May 22, 2013 | At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.

SC12 Editorial Feature HPCwire Soundbite sponsored by ISC

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events