Below is from today's WSJ online. Hopefully increased usage of SUNW servers/AMD opterons for supercomputing will enhance Sun's reputation and ultimately bring in significant dollars.
Best,
Mark
Japan Will Use
U.S. Technology
In Supercomputer
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 15, 2005; Page B2
The Tokyo Institute of Technology plans to build what could be Japan's largest supercomputer, based largely on technology from Sun Microsystems Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The machine will be built from Sun servers that use 5,240 of AMD's Opteron chips, each with the equivalent of two microprocessors. The institute projects performance for the system of about 100 trillion calculations a second by next spring, making it the most powerful in Asia and among the five most powerful in the world. The institute is expected to announce its plans as early as today.
The plans are a new twist in a technology race that sometimes has taken on nationalistic overtones. Japan's biggest machine at the moment, called the Earth Simulator, uses technology that came mainly from Japanese computer maker NEC Corp. The 2002 installation of that system set off alarms in Washington and prompted a push to regain the lead by installing bigger machines at institutions like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Satoshi Matsuoka, a professor at the institute who is leading the effort to build the system, said the U.S.-built technology was chosen largely because the institute wanted to build what researchers call a "cluster," a design that uses commodity building blocks like the x86 chip technology that Intel Corp. and AMD popularized in personal computers. Such machines are relatively inexpensive and easy to program, typically using variants of the popular Linux operating system.
Though the new machine won't use NEC's hardware, the Japanese computer maker will help integrate the U.S.-built technology. "This is really an international partnership," said Mr. Matsuoka, who said Japanese government officials approved of the decision. "We would like to establish partnerships with those who are willing to respond to our aggressive requirements."
Sun is particularly willing. The system is by far the biggest ever made by the company, which placed only four machines in a ranking of the 500 largest machines issued yesterday.
John Fowler, a Sun executive vice president, disclosed that the new supercomputer will be built using servers that each have sockets for eight dual-processor Opteron chips, a novel design for a cluster-style system. Besides Linux, the machine will be able to switch to applications that use Sun's Solaris software, he said.
Japanese researchers won't be content with the cluster. By 2011, they hope to push for the creation of a system that will be 100 times faster, Mr. Matsuoka said. |
