Sun Modular Datacenter

Last updated
A Sun Modular Datacenter on display at the Sun Microsystems Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, California Sun Modular Datacenter SunEBC.JPG
A Sun Modular Datacenter on display at the Sun Microsystems Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, California

Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container (shipping container) manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems (acquired in 2010 by Oracle Corporation). 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. [1] Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center. [2]

Contents

History

The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006; [3] the official product was announced in January 2008. [4]

A Project Blackbox with 1088 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list. [5]

The Sun Modular Datacenter, aka: Project Blackbox, was a concept design between MIT alums, Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas from Sun Labs and Danny Hillis from Applied Minds to determine what is the largest possible “thumb drive” that can still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, and air.  Their decision was a 20 foot standard shipping container would be ideal as transportation methods exist in near every country around the world. Internally the 20 foot container was highly modified to hold 8ea 40RU compute racks of servers and/or storage. Initial target audience was for secure portable DC and for disaster relief to allow internet access for email and insurance forms.

Prototype build occurred remotely at Applied Minds facility, managed by Adam Yates from Applied Minds and Russ Rinfret from Sun.

The team behind Project Blackbox:

Marketing

Engineering

Supply and Vendor Mgmt

Customers

The Internet Archive data facility Internet Archive Sun Modular Datacenter.jpg
The Internet Archive data facility

On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm. [6] [7] Other customers include Radboud University. [8]

In March 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its digital archive into a Sun MD, hosted at Sun's Santa Clara headquarters campus, [9] a realization of a paper written by Archive employees in late 2003 proposing "an outdoor petabyte JBOD NAS box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology 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 microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Hillis</span> American computer scientist

William Daniel Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data center</span> Building or room used to house computer servers and related equipment

A data center or data centre is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division</span> Provides computing resources for various NASA projects

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urs Hölzle</span> Swiss computer scientist

Urs Hölzle is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its engineering culture. His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking. Until July 2023, he was the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. In July 2023, he transitioned to being a Google Fellow only.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arctic Region Supercomputing Center</span>

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UltraSPARC T2</span> Microprocessor by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor is a multithreading, multi-core CPU. It is a member of the SPARC family, and the successor to the UltraSPARC T1. The chip is sometimes referred to by its codename, Niagara 2. Sun started selling servers with the T2 processor in October 2007.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. 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 the 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.

Redshift is a techno-economic theory suggesting hypersegmentation of information technology markets based on whether individual computing needs are over or under-served by Moore's law, which predicts the doubling of computing transistors every two years. The theory, proposed and named by New Enterprise Associates partner and former Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos, categorized a series of high growth markets (redshifting) while predicting slower GDP-driven growth in traditional computing markets (blueshifting). Papadopoulos predicted the result will be a fundamental redesign of components comprising computing systems.

The SPARC Enterprise series is a range of UNIX server computers based on the SPARC V9 architecture. It was co-developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu, announced on June 1, 2004, and introduced in 2007. They were marketed and sold by Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers under the common brand of "SPARC Enterprise", superseding Sun's Sun Fire and Fujitsu's PRIMEPOWER server product lines. Codename is APL.

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

Steele is a supercomputer that was installed at Purdue University on May 5, 2008. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Coates built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Steele was the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten outside a national center when built. It ranked 104th on the November 2008 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PetaBox</span> High-volume digital storage hardware

PetaBox, also stylized Petabox, is a storage unit from Capricorn Technologies and the Internet Archive. It was designed by the staff of the Internet Archive and C. R. Saikley to store and process one petabyte of information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OVHcloud</span> French web hosting and cloud computing company

OVH, legally OVH Groupe SA, is a French cloud computing company which offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area. As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe, and the third largest in the world based on physical servers. The company was founded in 1999 by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. OVH is incorporated as a simplified joint-stock company under French law. In 2019 OVH adopted OVHcloud as its public brand name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modular data center</span> Type of data centre

A modular data center system is a portable method of deploying data center capacity. A modular data center can be placed anywhere data capacity is needed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Performance Optimized Datacenter</span> Portable data centre

The HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) is a range of three modular data centers manufactured by HP.

HP Flexible Data Center, also termed FlexDC, is a modular data center built from prefabricated components by Hewlett-Packard and introduced in 2010. It is housed in five large buildings that form the shape of a butterfly. The Flexible DC looks like a traditional building, but it is fabricated off-site in order to circumvent the two years it often takes for traditional building construction. The building consists of a central admin area, surrounded by 1-4 data halls. FDC offers cooling options that are optimal for each type of climate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center</span> High performance computing center in Wyoming, US

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.

Christopher (Chris) Ferris is a computer scientist, best known for co-leading the Hyperledger Fabric project where he chaired the Technical Steering Committee from 2016 to 2018 and was a member of the Governing Board of the foremost blockchain project of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger has been one of the fastest-growing open community projects, with over 200 corporate and associate members. Ferris has a history of open-source software contributions to other technologies, including web services and cloud. Ferris is currently an IBM Fellow, and CTO Open Technologies.

References

  1. "Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Technical Specifications". 2008-05-27. Archived from the original on February 26, 2009. Retrieved 2013-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  2. M. Mitchell Waldrop - "Data Center In a Box", Scientific American, August 2007
  3. "Sun Unveils The Future of Virtualized Datacenters – Project Blackbox" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. 2006-10-17. Archived from the original on March 1, 2007. Retrieved 2013-06-08.{{cite press release}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  4. "Sun Modular Datacenter Fuels Momentum With New Customer Wins In Manufacturing, Healthcare, HPC And Telco". Sun Microsystems. 2008-01-29. Archived from the original on February 1, 2008. Retrieved 2013-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  5. "Sun Project Blackbox". TOP500 Supercomputing Sites. TOP500.org. June 2007. Archived from the original on 2008-08-03. Retrieved 2013-06-08.
  6. "SLAC Prepares for First Blackbox to Expand Computing Power". SLAC Today. 2007-06-20.
  7. "SLAC's Newest Computing Center Arrives... by Truck". SLAC Today. 2007-07-25.
  8. Rich Miller (2008-01-29). "Sun Rebrands Blackbox as 'Sun MD'". Data Center Knowledge. IDG TechNetwork. Archived from the original on 2008-06-05. Retrieved 2013-06-08.
  9. "Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems Create Living History of the Internet". Sun Microsystems. 2009-03-25. Archived from the original on March 26, 2009. Retrieved 2013-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  10. Bruce Baumgart; Matt Laue (2003-11-08). "Petabyte Box for Internet Archive" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-09-14. Retrieved 2013-06-08.