Sun is super, too

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	Lost in the flurry of supercomputing wins by vendors such as IBM Corp., Cray Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc., is the fact that Sun Microsystems Inc. is also a player in the high-performance computing market. The Santa Clara, Calif., company recently won a three-year, $2 million deal with the Energy Department to build a supercomputing cluster at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

Lost in the flurry of supercomputing wins by vendors such as IBM Corp., Cray Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc., is the fact that Sun Microsystems Inc. is also a player in the high-performance computing market. The Santa Clara, Calif., company recently won a three-year, $2 million deal with the Energy Department to build a supercomputing cluster at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

The cluster will consist of more than 230 Sun Fire V20z servers running AMD Opteron processors and the Solaris 9 operating system. To date, no Sun-built supercomputer ranks among the top 250 in the world. The 44th-ranked system at the University of Southern California includes both Sun and IBM servers. Sun officials expect the Idaho system to place in the top 150.

 

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