Sun Brings The Cheap Revolution to Supercomputing

The collective IQ of San Francisco has risen this week, with the arrival of nearly 4,000 Sun "customer engineers" from across the globe. Customer engineers encompass a very broad community at Sun, one that includes systems and support engineers, product developers, and a diversity of other technical functions all focused on supporting customers. In the spirit of perfect timing, my speech to the group coincides with our winning just about the biggest prize in all of supercomputing last week, a contract to build a 400 Teraflop system, the world's largest, for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (known as TACC). TACC is ironically conveniently located in Austin. Their press release is here. And here are few things to think about. First, the "cheap revolution" is winning out in high performance computing - Sun won because we could supply general purpose infrastructure and open source software, which in combination allows TACC to decommission their legacy proprietary Intel systems, and avoid having to use a customized solution. As I discussed here, general purpose systems and operating platforms have emerged as fast enough to displace proprietary and specialized systems. On a performance per watt basis (which is one of the metrics used to measure system efficiency), the numbers are staggeringly in favor of Sun's new wave of open innovation (which is why PG&E offers rebates for Sun's systems in California). The win is a comprehensive ...

Date: October, 04 2006
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/2_down_498_to_go

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