Sun Constellation System

Last updated

Sun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.

Contents

Main hardware components

Software stack

Services

Production systems

Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) was the largest production Constellation system. Ranger had 62,976 processor cores in 3,936 nodes and a peak performance of 580 TFlops. [1] [2] Ranger was the 7th most powerful TOP500 supercomputer in the world at the time of its introduction. [3] After 5 years of service at TACC, it was dismantled and shipped to South Africa, Tanzania, and Botswana to help foster HPC development in Africa. [4]

A number of smaller Constellation systems are deployed at other supercomputer centers, including the University of Oslo. [5]

Related Research Articles

Sun Microsystems Defunct American computer hardware and software company

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

SPARC RISC instruction set architecture

SPARC is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) originally developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed in the early 1980s. First developed in 1986 and released in 1987, SPARC was one of the most successful early commercial RISC systems, and its success led to the introduction of similar RISC designs from a number of vendors through the 1980s and 90s.

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE or GRD, was a grid computing computer cluster software system, acquired as part of a purchase of Gridware, then improved and supported by Sun Microsystems and later Oracle. There have been open source versions and multiple commercial versions of this technology, initially from Sun, later from Oracle and then from Univa Corporation.

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) was from 1993 to 2015 a research facility organized under the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Located on the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) campus, ARSC offered high-performance computing (HPC) and mass storage to the UAF and State of Alaska research communities.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and across the USA. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Supercomputer facility operated by the US Department of Energy in Berkeley, California

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, is a high performance computing (supercomputer) user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 7,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Cori, which was ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers in November 2016. NERSC is located on the main Berkeley Lab campus in Berkeley, California.

Sun Modular Datacenter portable data center manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems, built into a standard shipping container

Sun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. An external chiller and power were required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting it to the required infrastructure. Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

TOP500 Ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems.

Windows HPC Server 2008, released by Microsoft on 22 September 2008, is the successor product to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Like WCCS, Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters. This version of the server software is claimed to efficiently scale to thousands of cores. It includes features unique to HPC workloads: a new high-speed NetworkDirect RDMA, highly efficient and scalable cluster management tools, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, an MPI library based on open-source MPICH2, and cluster interoperability through standards such as the High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) specification produced by the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

SciNet Consortium

SciNet is a consortium of the University of Toronto and affiliated Ontario hospitals. It has received funding from both the federal and provincial government, Faculties at the University of Toronto, and affiliated hospitals.

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 petaFLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and is one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.

The Vayu computer cluster, was the predecessor of Raijin, the Current Peak System of the Australian National Computational Infrastructure, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. It was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a [Hindu] god], the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr,[2] after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.[3]

Tsubame (supercomputer)

Tsubame is a series of supercomputers that operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.

Supercomputing in Europe overview about supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

Xeon Phi series of x86 manycore processors from Intel

Xeon Phi is a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It is intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allows use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP.

Appro American technology company

Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting High Performance Computing (HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in Milpitas, California with a computing center in Houston, Texas, and a manufacturing and support subsidiary in South Korea and Japan.

NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center research facility

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

References

  1. "TACC > HPC Systems". The University of Texas at Austin. Archived from the original on 2009-08-01. Retrieved 2007-12-13.
  2. "More Ranger Facts and Figures". Sun Microsystems. Retrieved 2016-06-18.
  3. "TOP500 List - November 2008". TOP500.Org. 2010-08-11.
  4. Salazar, Jorge (2014-07-14). "Ranger Supercomputer Begins New Life". The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 2016-05-04.
  5. "HPC Consortium: University of Oslo". Sun Microsystems. 2008-06-17. Retrieved 2016-06-18.