Sun Adds Low-End Constellation Switch, New Quad-Socket Blade

Published: June 25, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the most technically sophisticated and elegant high-end supercomputer designs to come out of anywhere in the past decade is Sun Microsystems' Constellation System, which has a massive InfiniBand switch, dubbed "Magnum," designed by Sun at the heart of a clustered server and storage setup that can scale to over 2 petaflops of number-crunching power. Last week, Sun set its sights a little lower and announced a much less scalable switch to chase the midrange HPC and commercial clustering customer bases.

The new switch, called "Nano Magnum" and sold as the Datacenter Switch 3X24, is the baby brother of the Magnum switch. Sun was showing it off at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, last week. The Nano Magnum has 72 InfiniBand ports (three independent boards in the box) that support DDR 4X ports; this is a lot smaller, obviously, than the Magnum switch, which has 3,456 ports. (Multiple Magnum switches are daisy-chained together to hook up to 13,824 blades and storage into a 2 petaflops cluster.) The Nano Magnum fits in a 1U chassis, and they can also be daisy chained as a modest blade cluster grows, up to a total of 288 blade nodes.

The new switch is designed to be mounted in pairs atop the midrange Sun Blade 6048 blade chassis, and to round out the departmental HPC system, Sun also last week announced the Sun Blade X6450 blade server, a variant of the existing X8450 quad-socket blade server that it announced in February for the larger Sun Blade 8000 chassis. Both blades are based on Intel's dual-core "Tulsa" Xeon 7100 or quad-core "Tigerton" Xeon 7300 processors. The X6450 blade has 24 memory slots, and support 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB DIMMs for a maximum of 192 GB of main memory for those four sockets to share. The blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and four PCI-Express busses (two x8 and two x4, linked back to the PCI-Express midplane, which in turn links to peripherals.) With the X6450 blades, Sun can cram 768 Xeon cores in a rack, delivering 7.37 teraflops of computing power.

Sun is supporting Solaris 10 Update 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and 5.0, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 and 10 SP1, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2 on the X6450; VMware's ESX Server 3.0.2 and 3.5 hypervisors are also supported. The base X6450 blade costs $8,655; the configuration for that price was not available at press time.

The other announcement that Sun made at ISC last week was that it has been developing an integrated Solaris or Linux operating system pre-integrated with the Lustre file system (which Sun acquired last year), Grid Engine, and other HPC-related tools, which is to be called the Sun HPC Software stack. The Linux Edition 1.0 was launched at ISC 2008. Sun also updated Grid Engine (for gridding up servers and desktops) with a 6.2 release and HPC Cluster Tools (for MPI interconnections) with an 8.0 release.

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