Sun announces 1.2 TFlop rack server

Tampa (FL) - Sun today announced its new blade server 8000p at the supercomputing conference SC06. The extension of the existing 8000 model increases the density of the rack by 50% and squeezes 30 instead of 20 blades into one rack.

Each 8000p blade is capable of carrying four dual-core AMD Opteron 800-series processors with a clock speed of up to, integrates 16 DIMM slots for a maximum of 64 GB of memory as well as 2.5" hard drives.

The theoretical maximum capacity of a 30-unit rack is 120 processors or 240 processor cores, which, according to Sun, will deliver a performance of 1.248 TFlops. Three fully stacked racks would be enough to put an 8000p system into the list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. Pricing starts at $7500 for the chassis and $14,600 for an 8-way server module.

According to Sun representatives, the company will begin to more aggressively go after customers in the supercomputing market. Sun will try to differentiate itself by assembling the majority of the components of a system in its own facilities and not at the customer’s location. As a result, the installation of a high performance computer is expected to take less time and will require less people to be present on-site. Sun also promises to cut maintenance costs through automated monitoring services.

On the client side, Sun announced the Ultra 40 x86 workstation. The system can be equipped with up to two dual-core Rev F AMD Opteron processors, DDR2-667 memory devices and can carry up to 4 TB in storage capacity and four Nvidia graphics cards. Pricings tarts at about $2300 for a base model with one Opteron 248 processor, an Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 card, an 80 GB hard drive, a DVD drive and a CD burner.