Sun Microsystems Breaks Into Top Five on Top 500 Supercomputers List With Highest Ranking Open HPC System

DRESDEN, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced its first Sun(TM) Constellation System-powered supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) captured the number four spot on the Top 500 Supercomputers list – the highest ranking system based on an open architecture. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of Sun technology on the list, Sun HPC software and storage also made strong showings on the list with Sun's Lustre(TM) file system managing data on six of the list's top 10 sites as well as nearly half of the top 50 supercomputers. Additionally, half of the list's top 10 sites and nearly half of the top 50 systems archive their data on Sun storage. The Lustre file system is available for download at: http://www.sun.com/software/products/lustre/get.jsp.

“Sun's top five showing in the Top 500 list spotlights the power of Sun's open systems and technology innovation in HPC”

"Sun's top five showing in the Top 500 list spotlights the power of Sun's open systems and technology innovation in HPC,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems. “Working with TACC, we've delivered the highest ranking system built on an open architecture and open platforms and made it possible for customers the world over to take advantage of the power of superscale technologies in their own departments. With Sun's Constellation System, customers don't have to dream about a supercomputing Ferrari, they can drive their own."

The Ranger supercomputer at TACC is the largest computing system 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 326 TFlops and a peak performance of 504 TFlops, Ranger is based on the Sun Constellation System which combines the Sun Blade(TM) 6048 Modular System and the Sun(TM) Datacenter Switch 3456. 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/servers/hpc/SunConstellationPreview.jsp.

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.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer(TM)" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, The Network is the Computer, Sun Blade, and Lustre are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

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