Monday March 10 8:12 PM EST
Sun( Sun Microsystems Inc ) touts entry into supercomputing market
biz.yahoo.com
By Samuel Perry
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 10 (Reuter) - Sun Microsystems Inc. will announce Tuesday its entry into the supercomputing systems market long dominated by Cray Research, which was acquired by Silicon Graphics Inc last year.
Sun executives said in interviews ahead of the Tuesday announcement that their new Sun Ultra HPC servers will offer up to 45 percent better price performance than SGI's Origin 2000 and International Business Machine Corp.'s RS6000 SP.
Industry analysts said the move could vault Sun into an aggressive new player in a market which has been disrupted over the last decade by new massively-parallel computers.
"It's revolutionary for them," said Dataquest analyst Jerry Sheridan. "It presents a competitive environment. SGI is a strong competitor in the technical arena."
The move comes as Silicon Graphics is in the midst of a massive overhaul of its entire product line, a process which has dampened
its earnings as it strives to execute a strategy of moving into the commercial market, where Sun is strong.
Executives at Sun, which bought part of Cray's computing business from SGI as part of the SGI-Cray deal, said Tuesday's announcement was the first of a series of developments aimed at boosting Sun's share in the high performance computing market from virtually nothing last year.
Sun noted International Data Corp. projects the market for the world's most powerful computers, used for everything from nuclear weapons and environmental modelling to aerospace and automotive design, will hit $5.6 billion by the millenium.
"We're leveraging into the markets where we've been traditionally successful -- that is the markets of the technical, engineering and
scientific user," said Jamie Enns, manager of product marketing at Sun Microsystems Computer Co.
"I'm not even sure we're on the radar screen right now," Enns said in an interview. But he projected the company could grow to become "a significant component" such as 10-15 percent of the market in the next 12-18 months.
Sun's ultimate objective is to have a stake similar to the estimated 30-50 percent of the market now held by Silicon Graphics, he said.
"This is a five year program."
"I've spoken with (Sun Microsystems CEO) Scott McNealy and Scott wants it all," added Sheridan. "They have the capability and the product to play in the marketplace and of course the technology is just one small piece of the puzzle."
To help lay the infrastructure for sales and support to the high calibre researchers who use supercomputers, Sun said it has established a High Performance Computing (HPC) consortium which will have a total of 15 members worldwide.
Founding members are Syracuse University, University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Tennessee, the University of Tokyo in Japan, the Germany's University of Cologne and CENAPAD-MGG/CO in Brazil.
Sun said its recent acquisitions of the former Cray Business Systems Division and the GlobalWorks division of Thinking Machines Corp. along with its own Sun Ultra HPC server line were important features of the new capabilities.
Enns said the core product is based on the Enerprise Server 3000 to ES 6000 line of products Sun introduced in April 1996 and adds supercomputing features using Symetric Multiprocessing (SMP) server architecture and Uniform Memory Access (UMA) design
running parallel applications.
Sun said the U.S. list price for the systems will range from $43,745 to more than $2.5 million.
The 250 megahertz Sun Ultra HPC servers will be available immediately in six SMP configurations from the deskttop Sun Ultra HPC 2 to the supercomputer-class Sun Ultra HPC 10000 server. The machines scale from two to 64 processors and offer up to 64 gigabytes of memory and 20 terabytes of storage.
Sun said the top-end machine delivers more than 20 gigaflops of power -- a measure of supercomputing performance -- which it said was more than twice that of a fully-configured Digital Equipment Corp Alpha or a 32-processor Silicon Graphics Origin 2000.
(sam.perry @reuters.com, Palo Alto Bureau 415 846 5400) |
