SEATTLE, Wash. - November 15, 2005 - At
Supercomputing 2005, AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
(Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology
(Tokyo Tech), one of the world's leading technical institutes, is
creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The
system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD
Opteron™ processor cores [totaling more than 50 trillion floating point
operations per second (teraFLOPS)], Sun and NEC storage technologies
and NEC’s integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed’s Advance™
accelerator boards. Using Sun’s N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine,
the system will be provisioned to support the Solaris 10™ Operating
System (OS) as well as the Linux operating environment. It will be used
to help science and engineering researchers dramatically increase their
productivity. The Tokyo Tech system marks Sun’s largest high
performance computing (HPC) win to date. The grid-based supercomputer
plans to expand to more than 100 teraFLOPS by its operation in Spring
2006 and is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in
the world as ranked by Top 500(http://www.top500.org) in Summer 2006.
“Tokyo Tech's system will be leveraged by a wide range of researchers
within the university and throughout the world,” said Satoshi Matsuoka,
Professor in charge of Research Infrastructure at Global Scientific
Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. “These
researchers are tackling complex problems ranging from analyzing the
complex molecular structure of proteins, simulated bloodflow diagnosis
in human brains, modeling of the generation mechanism of Earth and
planetary magnetic field and their long term effects, to nanoscience
simulation of carbon nanotubes —all tasks that require exceptional
computing power and experience working with supercomputers.”
“Sun’s ‘Tools for TeraFLOPS’—64-bit innovations that enable rapid
deployment of power- and cost-efficient, terascale compute clusters—are
helping us make significant headway in the demanding HPC market,” said
John Fowler, executive vice president, Network Systems Group at Sun
Microsystems. “In conjunction with our partners, Sun is able to provide
the critical processing power required for the world’s most
compute-intense applications while keeping total cost of ownership at a
minimum.”
Sun partners AMD and NEC are playing pivotal roles in the development
of Asia's largest supercomputer. AMD offers customers the highest
performing x86 processor and leading-edge multi-core technology. NEC,
the primary systems integrator, is leading the design of the
infrastructure as well as the integration of the various applications
which will run on the system, based on their extensive experience in
building and managing ultra-scale HPC systems. The Tokyo Tech system
plans to be the world’s largest and fastest cluster as measured by core
CPU count and peak performance, respectively. It will include more than
21 Terabytes of memory and 1.1 Petabytes of hard disk storage, again
exceeding all competing systems within the Asia-Pacific region. There
are planned increases in performance to beyond 100 TeraFLOPS with
installation of additional ClearSpeed Advance boards (initially from
360 to more than 600) by the time of the system’s operation in the
Spring 2006.
“Tokyo Tech is among the numerous leading research and academic
institutions that rely on AMD64 technology to rapidly and
cost-effectively deliver results,” said Kevin Knox, vice president,
Commercial Business at AMD. “The superb design of the Dual-core AMD
Opteron processor is optimized for HPC and enterprise environments.
Built from the ground-up for 64-bit and true multi-core computing, the
AMD Opteron processor delivers leading-edge performance in the same
power envelope as single core processors. As evidenced by our growing
market share, corporations, academia and government agencies around the
world are recognizing the unique combination of industry-leading
performance and performance-per-watt AMD brings to x86 server solutions
such as the Sun Fire product line.”
In addition to working with AMD and NEC, Sun’s system also incorporates
technology from ClearSpeed Technology Inc., ClusterFS and Voltaire into
the Tokyo Tech system. ClearSpeed's Advance board accelerates common
HPC algorithms, optimizes the software to achieve maximum performance;
ClusterFS's Lustre parallel file system software allows the servers to
communicate with the storage in parallel, speeding access to the ever
increasing amounts of scientific data being processed; and Voltaire is
supplying high speed multi-protocol Infiniband switches and host card
adapters to connect both the servers and storage.
Source: AMD Press Release
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