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

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNW9cYY4tqc

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.