Sun CEO blogs on Constellation (and offers stats on Ranger)

Sun’s HPC Watercooler points to an entry on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog about Sun’s HPC strategy and why exactly it is that Sun thinks it can make money with HPC

The academic supercomputing community (there’s that word again) sets the pace for enterprise computing across the world which has grabbed on to HPC for an array of real world challenges, from virus, disease, and drug discovery, to customer purchase pattern analytics, capital markets trading, energy discovery, dynamic resource management – you name it, it’s one of the fastest growing segments in the marketplace. Proving that what starts in academia, ends up on main street.

So I’ve marked this post both enterprise and HPTC. The post also has an nice overview of Sun’s new Constellation box, including a baseball card of stats on TACC’s new system, which I will shamelessly re-blog here and hope that Jonathan will forgive me

TFLOPs: approximately500 TERAFLOPs
Magnums: 2 (>2000 4x IB ports each, expandable to 6,912 ports)
Thumpers: 72 (1.728 PB)
Metadata storage: STK6450 RAID (9.3 TB)
Tape storage: STK SL8500
Storage/Data Management: SAM/QFS
Racks: 82
IB NEMs: 328
Pegasus blades: 3936
Aggregate memory size: 123 TB
Number of cores: 62,976

Total racks: 94
Approx footprint: 2,037 sq ft
Approx power: 2.4 MWatts
IB cable length: ~14 kilometers