As we said it would (CI No 3,021), Sun Microsystems Inc’s lighting out after Silicon Graphics Inc and other HPC high-performance computing players, bundling its Ultra Enterprise SMP servers with a raft of parallelizing software, HPC development tools and applications and bringing them to market as the Ultra HPC server line. We’re not building a supercomputer, the company is careful to say, but it is keen to leverage its lead share of the technical workstation market. The essential difference between Sun and other HPC solutions, including SGI Origin, IBM SP2 and HP/Convex Exemplar, is that Sun is addressing the market with a symmetric multiprocessing model rather than distributed shared memory NUMA or shared-nothing architectures. Sun says that as far as it’s concerned the three bus transactions required by NUMA systems generate unacceptable latencies and that its efficient cache management techniques means the Ultra HPC SMP systems are still quicker. As part of the 1.0 cut of the HPC software it’s bundling on the machines Sun will sell and support version 2.2 of Platform Computing Corp’s popular Load Sharing Facility software for monitoring and managing resources, plus MPI and PVM message-passing libraries, Fortran77, Fortran90, multi-threading development and debugging tools. By year-end it will introduce the first iteration of the GlobalWorks parallelizing software it acquired from Thinking Machines Corp in the form of the Prism parallel debugging and visualization tools, plus high- performance Fortran, SL3, LSF 3.0, a parallel application environment and cluster administration tools. By then Solaris will support 64-bit file addressing, zero-copy TCP and UFS direct I/O. At least some of the clustering options will be provided by Sun’s forthcoming Full Moon cluster suite. The net result of implementing the GlobalWorks will allow developers to address a cluster of systems as a single virtual processing node. The 1Gbit/sec SCI Sbus adapter cards being created for clustering Sun servers by Dolphin Interconnect Solutions A/S that implement the Scalable Coherent Interface ANSI connection standard will be available to connect up to four Ultra HPC servers by year-end; a 16-way switch is due in 1998. Sun will add other Prism, Fortran and cluster tools and scientific libraries in 1998, plus co-scheduling, a parallel file system. In the same timeframe Solaris will support 64-bit virtual address space and cluster system management plus the cluster file system required to allow users to write their own clustered applications. The servers start at $43,750 for an HPC version of the Ultra 2 server, through $103,150 for a two-way Ultra HPC 4000, to $907,650 for a 16-way Ultra HPC 10000 which performs at up to 32 GFLOPS and costs $2.5m or more when fully stacked with 64 processors. Sun claims they offer up to 45% better price/performance than SGI Origin 2000 and IBM SP. The systems are designed for modeling, analysis and simulation in EDA MCAE, petrochemical, financial and academic markets. IDC expects the HPC market to grow from $3bn in 1995 to $5.6bn by 2000, with the biggest growth expected in the high-performance mid-range sector which Sun is addressing. That market will account for 56% of HPC sales by 2000. supercomputers will account for 10%, technical MPP systems 3% and strategic business analysis solutions, including large-scale data warehousing, 31%. Sun says it’s still got other cluster mechanisms under review, including Fujitsu Ltd’s 200Mbps AP-Net, and is still investigating the viability of NUMA which for the present it thinks is too exotic and untested.
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