The Unix Guardian--NEC and Sun Team for HPC Server Deals in North America

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Volume 4, Number 35 -- September 27, 2007

NEC and Sun Team for HPC Server Deals in North America

Published: September 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having already established a relationship in Japan to work on supercomputer deals and have Japanese server giant NEC peddle its X64 and Sparc servers in the Asia/Pacific region, Sun Microsystems has announced that NEC will be teaming up with Sun to chase high-performance computing deals in North America.

Under the agreement between the two companies, NEC will be able to do supercomputing installation, integration, and tuning work for Sun and for its customers in North America. Sun will also leverage NEC's software expertise in computational fluid dynamics, computational structural mechanics, and computational chemistry and materials science applications to help it add a software layer to pre-configured clusters that Sun makes and sells under its Customer Ready program. NEC will also help customers port their own applications to Sun clusters and help them tune these applications for new architectures and operating systems.

"For a number of years, Sun has worked with NEC to deliver high performance computing professional services," explained Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and integrated systems at Sun, in a statement. "This agreement will extend our marketing and sales capabilities enabling us to bring NEC’s expertise and Sun’s technology innovation to a broader market."

NEC has been a long-time partner of Hewlett-Packard's in the HP-UX space, but the company has been a reseller of Sparc/Solaris platforms in the Asia/Pacific geography since 2000. NEC has its own supercomputer business, based largely on its own SX series of massively parallel vector processors, which are sold all over the world and which are the foundation of the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer that was the undisputed number-crunching champion for a few years until IBM got its Blue Gene/L massively parallel Power-Linux box into the field. NEC, along with Japanese rival Hitachi, helped bring mainframe-class features to HP-UX 10 and 11i a few years back. NEC, by selling Sparc/Solaris boxes, also comes up against Fujitsu in the Asian market as well. Fujitsu is, of course, supplying Sun with the midrange and top-end the Sparc Enterprise server line as well as selling the machines itself and is also reselling Sun's entry "Niagara" Sparc T1 boxes these days, too.

Two and a half years ago, when NEC and Sun strengthened their alliance, NEC had hoped to boost its Solaris server business to a run rate of around $275 million a year. It is unclear if the company ever met this goal. NEC was the main integration partner for Sun for the 11.8 teraflops "Tsumabe" Opteron-Linux cluster installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2006 and now ranked number 14 on the Top 500 list of supercomputers and expected to rise to 85 teraflops over the course of the contract. Sun and NEC have also tag-teamed on an 1,100-processor, 4.5 teraflops parallel supercomputer for the National Institute of Space Research in Brazil, which will be used for weather modeling. NEC is not, as yet, involved in the 400 teraflops "Maverick" supercomputer Sun is installing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TAAC) at the University of Texas at Austin, which was announced a year ago.

Sun and NEC are not just targeting Solaris in their HPC deals, but are also embracing Linux and Windows Compute Cluster Services. Pushing Linux is a necessity, since Linux is pretty much the default operating system for HPC, but Windows CCS is also important because a lot of academic, government, and private institutions are looking at installing moderate HPC configurations and they do not have and do not want Linux expertise. Windows CCS will eventually get a foothold in the HPC space--it is inevitable. NEC Corporation of America will also offer remote administration and management services to Sun's HP customers in North America, as well as doing disaster recovery planning and systems integration.

The financial details of the HPC partnership were not announced.