Sun Puts Some Numbers on Its Constellation System

Published: November 15, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Supercomputing Conference 2007 show is underway this week in Reno, Nevada, and Sun Microsystems is very keen to get the word out that it can deliver petaflops-scale supercomputers to a market that seems eager to consume huge amounts of number-crunching capacity.

Sun first started talking about its "Constellation" supercomputer clusters at the other big HPC event of the year, the International Supercomputing Conference 2007, which was held back in June in Dresden, Germany. Now, Sun is taking orders for the servers, storage arrays, and InfiniBand switches that comprise the machine, and also delivered its long-awaited "Honeycomb" storage array, which has been labeled the StorageTek 5800.

The Constellation System, as the whole shebang is known, is based on the "Magnum" Datacenter Switch 3456, which as the name suggests is a massive InfiniBand switch with 3,456 ports. This switch is designed to replace the massive numbers of core and leaf switches that are needed in a typical InfiniBand cluster. To create a 1.7 petaflops system, four of these switches are daisy-chained together, linking 13,824 server nodes together and to their storage. The processing power in such a machine is supplied by clusters of the Sun Blade 6408 chassis, which can house up to 48 of Sun's Opteron or Xeon blade servers in a single rack, for a maximum of 768 cores (that's about 6 teraflops) per rack. The "Thumper" X4500 data servers, which pack 24 1 TB SATA disks into a 2U form factor. These Thumper arrays sit close to the compute nodes in the Constellation System, while the Honeycomb array is used to house much larger data sets that move in and out of the system as simulations are run. Sun is claiming that it can save HPC shops $28 million over five years in administration costs alone for storage using the Honeycomb machines compared to other sophisticated, petabyte-class HPC storage arrays.

According to Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and integrated systems at Sun, it costs multiple tens of millions of dollars to buy a Constellation System, depending on the processors, memory, and such, in the configuration. The cost per teraflops is well below $100,000, he says.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin hired Sun back in October 2006 to build a Constellation System rated at 400 teraflops and running Solaris. This machine should put Sun back into the Top 500 supercomputer list in a big way, once it is installed in January 2008.

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