GOVERNMENT

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND -- The Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF), a collaborative environment for data and numerical intensive computing privately run by the University of Cambridge and Cranfield University, has purchased 10 Sun Fire(TM) 15K servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW). The total investment, which includes more than $40 million in Sun technology, will dramatically increase the computing power, reliability, availability and scalability of the HPCF. The Universities' research teams will utilize this high performance computing ability for applications including large-scale numerical calculations in the areas of Computational Fluid Dynamics, Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Brain Imaging, Bioinformatics, and Economic Modeling. The computing capacity of the system will exceed 2 teraflops, which would place the Sun Cluster at Cambridge's HPCF among the top 20 supercomputers of the world, based on the recently published list of the top 500 supercomputers. "In order to support the variety of projects being done at the HPCF, we sought out an infrastructure with reliable and flexible performance," explained Prof. Ian Drummond, director of the HPCF, Cambridge University. "The superior flexibility of the Sun Fire 15k servers combined with Sun's reputation for delivering open, scalable and reliable high-performance solutions made Sun the obvious choice to lead our continued advances in high-performance computing and e-science." The Sun Fire 15K servers will be installed at the University of Cambridge and Cranfield University this fall and available to researchers throughout the UK as part of the Cambridge eScience Centre. The HPCF will play a critical role in spearheading the UK's eScience initiative, a collaborative effort to develop a nationwide grid infrastructure for continued research in multiple scientific disciplines. Sun maintains an early involvement in this nationwide initiative while also providing the grid infrastructure support for London's Imperial College, Oxford University and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. "As advancements in scientific research continue, universities will find themselves addressing more and more complex problems that require powerful and well-balanced computing infrastructures," said Joerg Schwarz, group manager of science and engineering at Sun Microsystems. "Sun has successfully delivered high performance computing solutions to numerous leading academic institutions, and we are honored to contribute to the critical research being conducted by the Cambridge-Cranfield HPCF facility and the UK eScience initiative." The Sun Fire 15K server, built on the industry's most general purpose architecture, is the world's largest single cabinet UNIX® server system featuring up to 106 processors, two to four times the memory of competitive products with 576 Gigabytes, and 18 I/O hubs for networking and storage connectivity. Additionally, the Sun Fireplane(TM) interconnect, first introduced with the Sun Fire 15K server, provides unprecedented throughput, critical for superior performance across a wide range of applications.