Constellation is supposed to be capable of 1.7 petaFLOPS, which may put it behind IBM's new undeployed Blue Gene/P, announced the other day, that's supposed to be good for 3 petaFLOPS, although initially - and more normally - it will do around 1 petaFLOPS continuously using 294,912 quad-PowerPC processors housed in 72 racks.

Doing 3petaFLOPS will take 884,736 processors and 216 clustered racks linked by a high-speed optical network and running Linux.

The most powerful computer in the world is currently the Blue Gene/L rated at 280 teraFLOPS.

Sun is building a 500 teraFLOPS Constellation, called the Ranger cluster and due in October, for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas although when exactly it'll all get put together depends on AMD providing enough quad-core Barcelona chips. They're using Barcelona because it's supposed to be better at floating point than Intel's Xeons.

Sun is building Constellation out of blades, the recently announced Blade 7000 technology actually, sorta like what SGI is doing with its new Carlsbad machine, and is using UltraSparc, Xeon and AMD blades, one of the reasons Sun calls it "open petascale computing."

It claims it's the first blade platform designed for extreme density and performance. It gets 768 cores (figure quad processors) and six teraFLOPS to a 42U rack except in this case it's using a Unibody desgn to accommodate more server modules and reduce the weight.

It figures that's 50% more compute power than the HP C-Class and 71% more than IBM's BladeCenter H and it can offer customers a "pay-as-you-grow" scheme.

The storage system can hold a petabyte of data in two racks.

Constellation's real novelty is Magnum, its 3,456-port Infiniband switch in a world where the biggest Infiniband switches have 288 ports and need auxiliary switches.

Thanks to Magnum Sun can reduce switching elements by a factor of 300 to one and pricey cables by six to one, and cram 3,456 nodes into a 20% smaller footprint, a mere 74 racks, letting it brag about its "breakthrough economics," not to mention reduced latency and ergo higher performance.

Sun thinks Magnum, which uses Mellanox' InfiniScale III switch chips, is so leading edge the concept is good for the next five years.

All of Constellation's components, by the way, like I/O, are supposed to be "best-in-class" and industry standard and the system runs general-purpose software on Red Hat, SUSE, Windows and Solaris.