Sun Microsystems Inc says it’s pushing ahead with the development of its next generation clustering interconnect in order to consolidate its growing share of the supercomputer market and push up into the high-end. With the publication of the latest Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers, published this week, Sun has seen its unit share of the list grow 14% over the June edition, up from 111 to 126 systems, which puts it second in line to Silicon Graphics Inc. SGI saw its unit share drop from 200 systems in June down to 183. Sun points out that it had no systems at all on the list in November 1996, when SGI had 222 systems, and claims it already has the biggest single architecture represented on the list, all Sparc-based. SGI is still merging its own Origin servers with those from Cray Research Inc, whereas Sun acquired only the Sparc-based business systems computers from Cray as the basis for its Starfire range. Although Sun is currently nowhere to be seen on the higher reaches of the list, it says it is now seriously competing for the 30 TFLOPS Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative Turquoise project, having won an ASCI PathForward award from the US Department of Energy. With the money, Sun has accelerated the development of its cluster interconnect. Sun currently uses the SCI Scaleable Coherent Interconnect switch it takes from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc (CI No 3,488), but the new project, under the control of Sun’s Clark Masters, plans to deliver a high-speed. low latency interconnect already deployed as a beta product at some customer sites, that it says will scale up to hundreds, and eventually thousands, of symmetrical multiprocessing nodes. Sun currently supports up to eight 64-way nodes. It believes most of its business will still come from commercial, rather than scientific customers, for applications such as large scale resource planning and databases. Meanwhile, Silicon Graphics, as expected (CI No 3,527) claimed this week to have installed the world’s most powerful supercomputer for the Department of Energy’s Blue Mountain project for Los Alamos National Laboratory. It claimed performance of 1.6 TFLOPS using the Linpack benchmark on the 6,144 processor systems. IBM Corp’s competing Blue Pacific system at Lawrence Livermore hasn’t yet been tested using Linpack. SGI claimed 46 of the top 100 spots on the list. IBM Corp has 22 systems in the Top 100, and 105 systems in the complete list. Sun has only one system in the Top 100, a 256 processor system installed at its own facility in Portland, Oregon, which holds the number 42 position on the list.
