Sun breaks through supercomputer haze with Constellation

After a slight delay a new, somewhat unusual, supercomputer from Sun Microsystems will get formally unveiled next week.

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The Texas Advanced Computing Center (Tacc) at the University of Texas will dedicate a Constellation System from Sun on 22 February, said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun, speaking at the company's global media summit. After Tacc, Sun hopes to start selling Constellations to more customers.

The linchpin of Constellation is the switch, the piece of hardware that conducts traffic among the servers, memory and data storage. Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these powerful computers.

Speaking in June, Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group, said: "We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes. We have been somewhat absent in the supercomputer market in the last few years."

Sun had hoped to launch the Tacc system in October but it ran into a variety of technical problems. First, AMD delayed the Barcelona processors that go inside the computer. Fowler said: "We got a special run of chips from AMD to make our commitments." Sun will later release more standard Barcelona servers when the chips become available.

But it wasn't all AMD, Fowler said. Constellation also sports a new type of cable, invented by Sun, which comes with three connections per cable. Manufacturing these cables, and then snaking them around the Tacc to link up computers, proved tougher than expected, he said.

Technical glitches also popped up with the Magnum switch.

The Tacc system will provide a peak performance of around 500 teraflops, or 500 trillion operations per second, and can be increased. It will be made up of 82 Sun blade racks stuffed with servers, two petabytes of storage, said Fowler. The whole system will fit inside a mid-size conference room but provide more computing power than all of the supercomputers the US' National Science Foundation has today.

The architecture will also allow Sun, according to the company, to challenge IBM in the rankings for the world's top supercomputers. IBM has dominated the supercomputer rankings with a series of Blue Gene systems for the last several years.

Original article: Sun's super supercomputer to launch from CNET News.com