Sun abroad: new clusters in Korea and Canada

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Sun announced late this week that they’ve sold two new clusters abroad. The first was sold to the Korean Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)

Sun logoKISTI’s fourth supercomputer “Tachyon” is the first open petascale computing environment combining ultra-dense high performance computing clusters, networking, storage and software into an integrated system to deliver highly available computational power to the Korean research community. Leveraging a range of Sun HPC technologies — including the Sun Blade 6048 chassis with Sun Blade server modules powered by AMD Opteron processors, Sun Storage, the Solaris 10 OS and the Lustre file system — Tachyon is helping researchers to study large-scale molecular dynamics on membrane proteins, collision simulation on black-holes, and multi-physics problems on solid surfaces. Sun xVM Ops Center is also providing KISTI with the ability to manage both its Linux and Solaris OS environments within a single unified solution.

The Sun customer page for KISTI has many more details. Here are a few

The fourth KISTI supercomputer, named “Tachyon” was designed as general-purpose supercomputer to be used predominately for academic research. In the first phase of the KISTI HPC project, 188 compute nodes (3,008 cores), four login nodes consisting of 32 CPUs, four debugging nodes consisting of 64 CPUs, 203 TB of disk storage, and 410 TB of tape storage, were installed. In the second phase of the project 300 TFLOPS of compute nodes (21,504 cores), 1 PB of disk storage, and 2 PB of tape storage will be deployed.

…Compared to the previous cluster based on a IBM p690-Series SMP cluster, performance has improved by approximately eight times. KISTI aims to achieve 24 TFLOPS in performance by the end of phase two, and 300 TFLOPS peak performance by 2010. The KISTI supercomputer achieved a rank of 130 in the recently published Top500 project list for supercomputers, enabling KISTI to maintain its position as one of the leading supercomputing centers in Asia.

And one in the Great White North (eh!)

The Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network (OCBN) and the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) at Queen’s University have established a high performance bioinformatics capability based on HPCVL’s compute cluster, consisting of Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers equipped with multi-core UltraSPARC T2 processors and running the Solaris 10 OS. These servers together with Sun’s CoolTools suite of HPC resources provide the OCBN with a unique and powerful combination of speed, memory bandwidth and scalability to optimize its compute-intensive, distributed, and multi-threaded cancer bioinformatics applications.