Earlier this week Sun launched its new X6640 blade server, a piece of gear aimed specifically at HPC
Sun Blade X6440 server module – The Sun Blade X6440 is a four-socket server with industry leading memory footprint and high-speed I/O to deliver a compute dense platform balanced for high-volume workloads. The Sun Blade X6440 server module posted a world record 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications(1).
Marc Hamilton had this to say on his blog
Today’s launch of the Sun Blade x6440 server module brings new levels of performance to the Sun Constellation System. With its industry leading memory footprint and I/O performance, the Sun Blade X6440 server module posted a world record 16-thread result on the prominent HPC SPECompM2001 benchmark that is often used to compare the performance of servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications (Sun Blade X6440 server module, 4 chips, 16 cores, 16 OMP threads, 35896 SPECompMpeak2001). Delivering on Sun’s future proof blade server design, the Sun Blade x6440 brings new levels of scalability to the Sun Constellation System supercomputer. In fact, if TACC’s Ranger supercomputer, currently #6 on the Top500 list, were to be upgraded with x6440 modules, I estimate it would jump from its current 6th place ranking to #3 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
