SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems today announced that its family of x64 (x86, 64-bit) and SPARC-based Sun Fire servers have been voted the "Supercomputing Product of the Year" in Supercomputing Online's annual Reader's Choice Award survey. The annual survey had more than 1,000 respondents, with the Sun Fire servers receiving close to 25 percent of the total votes among twelve nominated high-performance computing (HPC) products, including those from HP and IBM. Supercomputing Online is a leading Web-based news source for HPC, networking and communications professionals. "Customer feedback on the Sun Fire servers has been overwhelmingly positive," said Chris O'Neal, publisher of Supercomputing Online. "This is evidence that the Sun Fire servers have scored a big win in the minds of our readers and says volumes about the reputation that Sun continues for itself in the market. Sun Microsystems' industry-defining Sun Fire server win underscores how more and more professionals are using data-intensive applications that are brought to life through Sun's superior product. The great strength associated with Sun's ability to innovate and integrate new technology will drive ever-increasing levels of performance and value to help the world's supercomputing professionals overcome the challenges they face." The Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers, powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors, offer one-and-a-half times the performance, consume about one-third the power and are one-quarter the size of similar servers from competitive vendors, delivering a combination of performance, features and value to customers that is not available from any other server supplier. Likewise, the UltraSPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers offer massive, horizontal scalability and extreme rack mount compute density with up to five times the performance of competing systems, at one-third the power consumption. Additionally, Sun Fire servers offer leading-edge HPC capabilities to the customer, enabling them to scale HPC projects based on the servers' advanced system management capabilities and enhanced power. Sun's receipt of the "Supercomputing Product of the Year" award reinforces Sun's focus to make HPC and supercomputing a low-risk activity for customers. "This award is especially significant to Sun since it comes from the readers of Supercomputing Online, which is a core component of our customer base and comprises an audience that is evaluating and purchasing solutions for practical deployments of our technology," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and Grid Computing, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is making HPC much more attainable and practical for all customers. Whether it's crash simulation on cars, analysis to figure out how to extract more oil out of the ground or helping to find a cure for diseases, we are working directly with the customer to help them solve real-world issues. We are applying engineering disciplines from high-end data center designs and an ability to package solutions together as a way to make it much easier and more reliable to build out an HPC infrastructure." More information about Sun Fire servers can be found at: its Web site. Detailed results on Supercomputing Online's Reader's Choice Awards can be found at: its Web site.