HPCwire: Sun Unveils New Opteron and UltraSPARC Systems

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August 18, 2006

Sun Unveils New Opteron and UltraSPARC Systems

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Sun Microsystems has added ten new products to its Sun Fire server family that runs the Solaris 10 operating system. The company has introduced their new 1.8 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processor-powered servers and new x64 (x86, 64-bit) systems and workstations powered by the Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor family.

"As our recent revenue growth helps illustrate, Sun's server business has never been stronger," said John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president, Systems Group. "Today we add new systems and additional firepower to our existing line, building on the success of our industry-standard x64 and CoolThreads servers and leveraging the world-record performance, reliability and virtualization capabilities of the Solaris OS. With systems that scale from multi-core and multi-threaded 2- to 72-ways, a broad range of pricing and capabilities and support for multiple operating systems, Sun's rock-solid portfolio serves every aspect of computing."

The new servers and workstations have generated wide support from a variety of Sun customers, including the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC), Broadcom, High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL), Mentor Graphics and the University of Michigan.

"We rely on Sun's latest technologies to allow HPCVL's researchers from six universities and colleges throughout Canada to do more work with faster processing time and larger workloads," said Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director at the High Performance Computing Laboratory (HPCVL). "Sun's new UltraSPARC IV+ servers with new, powerful 1.8 GHz processors running on the Solaris 10 OS have enabled over a 5x increase in throughput performance. We are working closely with Sun to protect our long-term investment in Sun's latest innovation."

"The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center needed a flexible, cost-effective, high-performance supercomputing environment in order to facilitate a wide range of scientific research -- such as ocean and climate modeling, tsunami analysis, regional weather forecasting and other applications that require basic computational fluid dynamics," said Frank Williams, ARSC Director. "Sun's new AMD Opteron-powered products, with huge memory, large disk bandwidth and a fast cluster interconnect, comprise an overall cost savings and energy-efficient architecture, making them the ideal systems to drive our compute-intensive work."

Sun Claims Up to 8x Performance Boost to UltraSPARC Server Family: Over 70 World Records Strong

The new 1.8 GHz UltraSPARC processor demonstrates Sun's ongoing commitment to the SPARC platform, powered by the Solaris 10 OS that offers customers an "on-the-fly" upgrade path for taking advantage of the latest server technology. Sun says the new UltraSPARC systems will give customers up to an 8x performance increase over previous SPARC processor generations. These enhanced systems are suited for enterprise applications, consolidation projects and migrations.

Available for purchase immediately, the new Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers are powered by new 1.8 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors with double the memory capacity and improved I/O. Sun claims over 70 performance records, this week adding a new world record benchmark for performance and scalability that surpass competing servers from IBM and HP.

The Sun Fire E25K server with 72 UltraSPARC IV+ 1.8 GHz processors beat the best IBM result, the recently announced IBM eServer p5 595 with 64 POWER5+ 2.3 GHz processors by 9 percent on SPECint_rate2000.

The Sun Fire E25K server with 72 UltraSPARC IV+ 1.8 GHz processors improved the performance over similar Sun Fire E25K's with UltraSPARC IV 1.2GHz and UltraSPARC IV+ 1.5GHz processors by 93 percent and 13 percent respectively on SPECint_rate2000.

The Sun Fire V890 server, equipped with 8 UltraSPARC IV+ 1.8 GHz processors achieved the overall World Record performance in the r6iNotes Notesbench benchmark with 40,000 users, using the Domino7 messaging server. With the new r6iNotes result, the Sun Fire V890 beats the IBM p5 550 (8 Power5+ 1.5 GHz) with 54 percent more users and beats the much more expensive 16-way IBM p5 p570 by 40 percent.

The Sun Fire E25K server configured with 1.8 GHz US-IV+ processors and Sun StorEdge 3510FC arrays set a new world record for the LHS BSCS iX billing and customer care system benchmark, achieving 1,264,490 invoices/hr, a speedup of over 12 percent compared to the previous Sun Fire E25K server world record of 1,125,179 invoices/hr set with 1.5 GHz US-IV+ processors.

The Sun Fire E6900 or E25K Chassis Upgrade Promotion provides a E6900 and E25 chassis free of charge for trading-in qualified Sun and competitive servers, allowing customers to consolidate at their own pace. Enabling the mixing and matching at various processor speeds, these systems can be tailored to a variety of workloads with no box swap required and enable customers to add faster processors as they become available and consolidate thousands of applications onto a single server via Solaris 10. Sun claims that customers can replace IBM Power 4 equipment with Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV+ based servers and and upgrade for half the cost versus competing IBM system.

Sun also introduced new entry-level x64 servers, in addition to an x64 workstation. Designed for high-performance computing, visualization and web-tier applications, the Sun Fire X2100 M2 server, Sun Fire X2200 M2 server and Sun Ultra 20 M2 Workstation are designed to provide a combination of performance, energy efficiency and manageability. The company claims the Sun Fire X2200 M2 server has up to twice the memory capacity and networking connectivity as other servers in its class, making it suited for compute-intensive simulation or modeling with large data sets. The systems are pre-installed with the Solaris 10 OS, in addition to giving customers the flexibility of running standard distributions of Linux and Windows.

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