Sun Microsystems has announced the opening of its Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing (HPC), located in Hillsboro, Ore., and designed to make HPC practical and attainable for a wide array of customers and partners.

Opened with fanfare by Sun's Andy Bechtolsheim and John Fowler, along with Hillsboro Mayor Tom Hughes, the facility offers customers access to world-class scientists and algorithm experts who specialize in developing and deploying large-scale HPC solutions based on best practices, the company says, and also provides them access to some of the highest-performance storage, x64 (x86, 64-bit) and SPARC processor-based systems on the planet. In this unique environment, customers and partners will also have an option of deploying and running their applications on a variety of environments, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), and standard distributions of Linux and Windows.
The facility and HPC experts can help customers build and achieve large-scale HPC clusters and data centers as they experiment, benchmark, test and optimize scalable grid-based applications suitable for industries such as energy, manufacturing, life sciences, education and research.

"This announcement marks another milestone in delivering solutions for HPC and supercomputing. By leveraging Sun's decades of innovation and expertise, customers can use the Sun Solution Center for HPC to quickly and cost-effectively deploy large-scale cluster systems. In addition, the power efficiency of our Sun Fire servers powered with SPARC and AMD Opteron processors help make large-scale computing a viable option for many customers. With the recent acquisition of StorageTek, we hope to feature StorageTek products in the lab soon," said John Fowler (pictured), executive vice president, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "As HPC capabilities grow from TeraFLOPS today, to PetaFLOPS in the near future, Sun's world-class technologies and the growth of the Sun Solution Center for HPC can help our customers innovate and lead in this market."

The Sun Solution Center is designed to speed deployment of large-scale HPC clusters. Customers such as Aachen University and Clemson University plan to use the new facility for testing upcoming HPC projects. "With the new Sun Solution Center for HPC we can test and tune our grid-based applications, leveraging the highest-performance x64 servers in the market," said Jim Leylek, director and professor of mechanical engineering, Advanced Computational Research Laboratory (ACRL), Clemson University. "Through its high-performance, low-cost and easy-to-deploy offerings, Sun is making HPC production ready and accessible."

The Sun Solution Center for HPC also acts as a Proof-of-Concept (POC) facility where customers and partners can simulate their environment by testing and fine-tuning their specific applications to achieve optimal performance. Customers can test and collaborate on HPC solutions through a grid infrastructure, using grid-based technologies such as the award-winning Sun N1 Grid Engine and Sun N1 System Manager software for systems management.