Sun announced yesterday a bump in its high-end X8000 blade server series. The X8000 series is the anchor of Sun’s blade offering in HPC (by contrast Japan’s TSUBAME system is built from X4600 Opteron servers with ClearSpeed accelerators).
Each Sun Blade X8420 has 4 sockets for dual-core 2.8 GHz AMD Opteron series 8000 processors. From the release:
These features allowed the Sun Blade X8420 server module to shine on a variety of industry-standard benchmarks and set an 8-thread world record on SPEC OMPM2001 suite…. Furthermore, the Sun Blade X8420 server module posted two x86 world records on both floating point and integer-intensive suites of SPEC CPU2006 benchmark.
Sun posts its benchmark results here.
In April of last year The Unix Guardian at the IT Jungle interviewed Sun’s Tom Fowler. The article is a little dated now in technical details, but Fowler’s quote about Sun’s focus in HPC is interesting:
We think HPC is going back to fatter nodes, and our upcoming … machines will cater to this,” said Fowler. “You want as much local memory as possible, and when you do the price/performance, this scenario wins over skinny boxes.”