Demonstrating its commitment to provide scalable, cost-effective, supercomputing-class solutions for high performance computing (HPC) applications, Sun Microsystems achieved announced results for the industry-standard Linpack benchmark that are up to 78 percent faster than the SGI Origin 2000. The results, which take advantage of Sun`s new 336 MHz UltraSPARC II CPUs, once again demonstrate the ability of Sun HPC servers to provide the industry`s most competitive price/performance and scalability. Sun`s HPC solutions offer supercomputing-class processing power with a small number of easy-to-manage, commercially available Sun systems, all of which run the award-winning Solaris operating environment and maintain binary compatibility with the largest base of UNIX applications for proven robustness. High performance computers solve computationally complex problems by applying parallel computing techniques to a wide variety of applications. These include computational fluid dynamics for aircraft and automotive design; electronic circuit simulation; seismic data processing and petroleum reservoir modeling; and data mining solutions of bioinformatics, finance and business problems. Customers in government, academic and research fields, as well as in the petroleum, automotive, aerospace, electronics, financial and business sectors, take advantage of Sun`s HPC products to accomplish these compute-intensive tasks. Linpack benchmarks are a widely used set of tests, emphasizing floating point addition and multiplication, that measure HPC performance. There are several metrics for each Linpack benchmark, which define performance expectations and testing limitations. Sun`s results for the Highly Parallel Version of the Linpack benchmark have been submitted to Jack Dongarra, creator of the Linpack benchmark. Benchmark results and configuration A single node Sun HPC 10000 server--popularly known as the Starfire server--demonstrated 34.17 gigaflops (Gflop/s) for the Highly Parallel Computing version of the Linpack benchmark with a matrix size of 20,352 (Nmax). Results for the system were achieved using 64 UltraSPARC II (336 MHz) CPUs(1), each with 4 megabytes (MB) second-level cache, running the Solaris 2.6 operating environment. The system was configured with 22 gigabytes (GB) of memory and 150 GB of Sun StorEdge A3000 storage. These results delivered 80% of peak theoretical performance and outperformed the 64 CPU SGI Origin 2000, Digital AlphaServer 8400, IBM SP2 and HP Exemplar X-Class servers. With 30 UltraSPARC II (336 MHz) CPUs, a single Sun HPC 6000 server configured with 4MB second-level cache, 7.5 GB of memory and 60 GB of A3000 storage, outperformed several 32 processor competitive systems, including the SGI Origin 2000, Digital AlphaServer 8400, IBM SP2 and HP Exemplar X-Class servers. The Sun HPC 6000 delivered 17.89 Gflop/s with a matrix size of 20,352 (Nmax) and achieved 89% of peak CPU performance.
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