Sun’s Lustre File System Powers More Than 50 Percent Of The Top 50 Supercomputers; 9 Of The Top 10 Systems Use Sun Storage Technologies

Sun Increases Overall Presence on Top 500 Supercomputers List, Maintains Top 10 Standing with TACC’s Ranger Supercomputer at #6
AUSTIN, Texas SC08.-Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced its Lustre File System is managing data on more than 50 percent of the Top 50 Supercomputers and seven of the top 10 supercomputers. According to the latest Top 500 Supercomputers list released today, Sun increased its overall presence on the list, with the Sun Constellation System-powered supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) taking the number six spot. In addition, nine of the top 10 supercomputers are using Sun Storage technologies, including Lustre and tape storage. The Lustre file system is available for download at: http://www.sun.com/software/products/lustre/get.jsp.

“Storage is playing an increasingly critical, and visible, role in supercomputing - today’s Top 500 list proves that out,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. “For years, compute and networking led the evolution of HPC. With the gains Sun’s Lustre file system and storage solutions have made on the list, it will clearly be the segment to watch moving forward.”

The Ranger supercomputer at TACC is one of the largest computing systems in the world for open science research and is the most powerful supercomputer in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation-sponsored network of advanced computers used for science and engineering research and education. With a compute capacity of 433.2 Tflops and a peak performance of 579 Tflops, Ranger is based on the Sun Constellation System, which combines the Sun Blade 6048 Modular System and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 with Sun Fire X4500 storage servers. Sun Constellation System is the result of system-level innovations that build on cost-effective, off-the-shelf components and state-of-the-art technologies, and deliver an open, petascale architecture for HPC.

For more information about Sun Constellation System, please visit: http://www.sun.com/sunconstellationsystem

For more information on Sun’s HPC storage solutions visit: http://www.sun.com/hpc

Published by researchers at the University of Tennessee, NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Mannheim in Germany, the TOP 500 list tracks the use of supercomputer installations at commercial, scientific and academic research institutions. The list is released twice a year and can be viewed at www.top500.org.