Sun Microsystems’ first Sun (TM) Constellation System-powered supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) captured the number four spot on the Top 500 Supercomputers list, the highest ranking system based on an open architecture.

Demonstrating the pervasiveness of Sun technology on the list, Sun HPC software and storage also made strong showings on the list with Sun's Lustre(TM) file system managing data on six of the list's top 10 sites as well as nearly half of the top 50 supercomputers.

Additionally, half of the list's top 10 sites and nearly half of the top 50 systems archive their data on Sun storage.

"Sun's ‘top five’ showing in the Top 500 list spotlights the power of Sun's open systems and technology innovation in HPC,” said executive vice-president, Sun Systems, John Fowler.

“Working with TACC, we've delivered the highest ranking system built on an open architecture and open platforms and made it possible for customers the world over to take advantage of the power of superscale technologies in their own departments. With Sun's Constellation System, customers don't have to dream about a supercomputing Ferrari, they can drive their own." 

The Ranger supercomputer at TACC is the largest computing system in the world for open science research and is the most powerful supercomputer in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation-sponsored network of advanced computers used for science and engineering research and education.

With a compute capacity of 326 TFlops and a peak performance of 504 TFlops, Ranger is based on the Sun Constellation System which combines the Sun Blade(TM) 6048 Modular System and the Sun(TM) Datacenter Switch 3456.

Sun Constellation System is the result of system level innovations that build on cost-effective, off-the-shelf components and state-of-the-art technologies, and deliver an open, petascale architecture for HPC.

Published by researchers at the University of Tennessee, NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Mannheim in Germany, the TOP 500 list tracks the use of supercomputer installations at commercial, scientific and academic research institutions. – TradeArabia News Service