Sun "Raptor" Cluster at Mississippi State

Raptor
Originally uploaded by Roger Smith.

A new high-performance compute cluster was recently set up at Mississippi State University, which is now the fastest all-Sun cluster in the world. It has 2048 AMD Opteron 2218 compute cores and has a total of 4 terabytes of memory. It has a peak performance of over 10 trillion calculations per second (10 TFLOPS).

I just recently got myself 5 of these new Sun "Aquarius"-class warships, of the x2200 variety - each running 2 dual-core AMD Opteron 22xx processors. Now, these new Sun boxes sport a brilliant green system status light (the only LED on the front panel) which is bright enough to light the room up if you turn the datacenter lights out. I always wondered what a full rack would look like, but here's a ton more than that -- and what amounts to what's now the fastest all-Sun cluster in the world.

I've grown to really like these new Sun boxes, even if they are at the low end of the spectrum. The integrated lights-out manager rocks -- lets you just plug in and watch the thing from power-up, through the bios, all the way into running the system -- all via a Java-based window in your browser.

They're also fast as all hell.

No, Sun didn't pay me to write this. I just happen to like Sun equipment (or any Quality equipment for that matter) and when I saw this post on Flickr, I had to say something. I know most of my posts are on the Scientology end of my "Scientology Network Engineer" beingness, but sometimes I just have to gush about hardware. :)