Sun Opens Processor Design Ranch

In my mind, a ranch is a place where folks raise furry tasty critters, but it sounds as though Sun Microsystems is raising silicon down on the farm, and lots of it. Last week, the company opened the doors of a facility to house its Sunnyvale, Calif., 2,800 processor-and-growing microprocessor design Compute Ranch. The new facility, and its sister sites in Austin, Texas and Chelmsford, Mass., is supposed to speed development of new versions of the UltraSPARC processor by dedicating increasingly massive computing power to the task of designing and verifying complex, multi-Gigahertz, multi-100-million transistor processor designs. The ranches, which total 5,500 processors, serve Sun's 1,300-member processor design engineering team. The Compute Ranch's main role is to perform the calculations required to design new processors. To give some idea of the number crunching required for this kind of work, Sun says that designing the UltraSPARC III processor required more than 400 Billion simulated cycles. At tape out for the UltraSPARC III processor, when designers send a chip design to the fab for production, data for the chip consisted of 90,000 data files, occupying 23 Gigabytes of disk space. In its current configuration, the 5,500 processors are contained in over 700 separate multi-processor systems. The Ranches also feature 30 high-availability file server clusters, and the entire infrastructure encompasses 4.7 trillion Bytes (teraBytes) of RAM and 250 TeraBytes of data storage. Sun says the Ranches run at 98 percent of their processing capacity 24/7/365.