HPC and OpenSolaris

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I’m paying a lot of attention to what Sun is doing in HPC these days, partly because they are working very hard to say a lot and say it often in multiple channels. Of the currently crop of tier 2 and higher HPC vendors, Sun is doing the best job of getting its message out right now (of course, we have to wait and see whether this approach generates more sales).

Marc Hamilton has a post on his blog outlining how you can build your own microbrew TSUBAME:

First, you might want to start with Carl Hensler’s InfiniBand at Sun presentation. InfiniBand is fast becoming the defacto [sic] standard for HPC cluster interconnects and Sun is working hard to make sure we not only have great support for current products but that we are ready with Solaris support for the next generation IB HCAs based on Mellanox Hermon technology later this year. These next generation HCAs should increase the trend of IB being used not only for the cluster compute interconnect but also for the cluster storage interconnect. Here is a great white paper from Voltaire on IB based storage. Sun customers like the Tokyo Institute of Technology are using IB to connect more than a PetaByte of storage to their IB cluster. …

We have even started to make it easy for you to download a complete HPC development environment with the recent Solaris Developer Release, but truly hard core HPC developers will want to go a bit farther. My recommendations, be sure to get the latest OpenMPI support by downloading the early access release of Sun HPC Clustertools 7 and also the latest Sun Studio 12 compilers.

[Update: link back to Marc’s original post.]