SEATTLE, Wash. - November 15, 2005 - At Supercomputing 2005, AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), one of the world's leading technical institutes, is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron™ processor cores [totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)], Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC’s integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed’s Advance™ accelerator boards. Using Sun’s N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine, the system will be provisioned to support the Solaris 10™ Operating System (OS) as well as the Linux operating environment. It will be used to help science and engineering researchers dramatically increase their productivity. The Tokyo Tech system marks Sun’s largest high performance computing (HPC) win to date. The grid-based supercomputer plans to expand to more than 100 teraFLOPS by its operation in Spring 2006 and is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by Top 500(http://www.top500.org) in Summer 2006.

“Tokyo Tech's system will be leveraged by a wide range of researchers within the university and throughout the world,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor in charge of Research Infrastructure at Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. “These researchers are tackling complex problems ranging from analyzing the complex molecular structure of proteins, simulated bloodflow diagnosis in human brains, modeling of the generation mechanism of Earth and planetary magnetic field and their long term effects, to nanoscience simulation of carbon nanotubes —all tasks that require exceptional computing power and experience working with supercomputers.”

“Sun’s ‘Tools for TeraFLOPS’—64-bit innovations that enable rapid deployment of power- and cost-efficient, terascale compute clusters—are helping us make significant headway in the demanding HPC market,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Network Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. “In conjunction with our partners, Sun is able to provide the critical processing power required for the world’s most compute-intense applications while keeping total cost of ownership at a minimum.”

Sun partners AMD and NEC are playing pivotal roles in the development of Asia's largest supercomputer. AMD offers customers the highest performing x86 processor and leading-edge multi-core technology. NEC, the primary systems integrator, is leading the design of the infrastructure as well as the integration of the various applications which will run on the system, based on their extensive experience in building and managing ultra-scale HPC systems. The Tokyo Tech system plans to be the world’s largest and fastest cluster as measured by core CPU count and peak performance, respectively. It will include more than 21 Terabytes of memory and 1.1 Petabytes of hard disk storage, again exceeding all competing systems within the Asia-Pacific region. There are planned increases in performance to beyond 100 TeraFLOPS with installation of additional ClearSpeed Advance boards (initially from 360 to more than 600) by the time of the system’s operation in the Spring 2006.

“Tokyo Tech is among the numerous leading research and academic institutions that rely on AMD64 technology to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver results,” said Kevin Knox, vice president, Commercial Business at AMD. “The superb design of the Dual-core AMD Opteron processor is optimized for HPC and enterprise environments. Built from the ground-up for 64-bit and true multi-core computing, the AMD Opteron processor delivers leading-edge performance in the same power envelope as single core processors. As evidenced by our growing market share, corporations, academia and government agencies around the world are recognizing the unique combination of industry-leading performance and performance-per-watt AMD brings to x86 server solutions such as the Sun Fire product line.”

In addition to working with AMD and NEC, Sun’s system also incorporates technology from ClearSpeed Technology Inc., ClusterFS and Voltaire into the Tokyo Tech system. ClearSpeed's Advance board accelerates common HPC algorithms, optimizes the software to achieve maximum performance; ClusterFS's Lustre parallel file system software allows the servers to communicate with the storage in parallel, speeding access to the ever increasing amounts of scientific data being processed; and Voltaire is supplying high speed multi-protocol Infiniband switches and host card adapters to connect both the servers and storage.



News Source: AMD Press Release
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