Sun's new Sun TM HPC family of servers offers the performance of supercomputers with the advantages of cost-effective, easily expandable, and easily managed networked servers. The Sun HPC series allows customers to gracefully apply more computing resources as needed, using standard, open parallel processing and workload management software for optimal performance. While other vendors have reached peak power for their SMP systems, Sun continues to engineer faster, more scalable SMP designs delivering the highest usable performance for compute-intensive tasks. The efficient SMP architecture enables the Sun HPC servers to provide true scalability, up to 64 processors in a single server, and, in the future, up to 1,024 CPUs in a cluster. In other multiprocessing systems, due to the inherent limitations of the system design, performance may increase only 40 to 60 percent for each processor added.
Scalability is particularly important for systems with more than a dozen processors.
As customers add processors, they continue to receivethe full value of their investment. Sixteen separate data paths help reduce the bottlenecks typically found in other system architectures, allowing for maximum performance even in fully configured, heavily loaded systems. Sun HPC cluster configurations will use a high-speed dedicated internode communication technology known as Sun Cluster Channel TM . Tools to Extract the Best Performance Sun offers a robust software environment for developing, running, and managing complex, compute-intensive applications. The Sun HPC series supports Solaris TM , the industry's leading networked SMP operating environment.