Sun Microsystems may be gone, but their large-scale HPC installations continue to impress users with their scaling and efficiency. Drew Robb writes about the Red Sky supercomputers at Sandia National Labs.
A good metric for data center efficiency is Power Usage Efficiency (PUE). You divide the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it to arrive at a ratio. The closer you are to 1, the better. The facility has achieved a PUE of 1.27 even when additional enterprise computing equipment beyond the Red Sky/Red Mesa supercomputer is factored in. ”It is outstanding to achieve a PUE of 1.27 with a 43,000 core machine,” said John Zepper, senior manager of computer systems at Sandia National Laboratories
In this time-lapse video, we see the installation of Red Sky, Sandia’s Sun Constellation System supercomputer, which ranked number 10 on the TOP500 at it’s debut.
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