Technology Visionaries Worldwide Compute with Sun’s UltraSPARC III Servers and Workstations
Sun Microsystems, Inc. UltraSPARC® III processor-based systems are at the heart of innovative research and are solving the world’s most difficult problems, from pharmaceuticals to Formula One racing to cosmology. UltraSPARC III processors power the Sun Fire[tm] Midframe family of servers, the Sun Fire 280R entry-level server, and the Sun Blade[tm] 1000 workstation. These systems have sold into the tens of thousands worldwide in less than a year.
“With the UltraSPARC III chip, Sun created systems to keep pace with the human imagination,” said John Shoemaker, executive vice president and general manager for Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems. “The UltraSPARC processor’s proven reliability and scalability are behind some of the most fascinating technology-driven projects around the world, including exploration of the universe, decoding of the human body and 3-D modeling for better race cars. With the upcoming addition of Sun’s next-generation high-end server, we can only imagine how this list will grow.”
The power and versatility of UltraSPARC processor powered products can be seen helping to solve the toughest problems, in their vast variety of uses:
Attesting to the power and flexibility of Sun’s Midframe servers, customers such as the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, and Caprion Pharmaceuticals are enlisting Sun servers to help address some of their respective industries’ most challenging issues. The University of Durham’s new supercomputer facility, the “Cosmology Machine,” is undertaking the most complex and far-reaching cosmology project to date with the help of Sun’s Midframe servers. The facility consists of 64 Sun Blade 1000 workstations and a 24-way Sun Fire 6800 server managed by Sun’s Grid Engine software that is helping to re-create the evolution of the universe through ultra-high-speed calculations of data from billions of observations of stars, gases and galaxies.
Also focused on life-altering discoveries, Caprion Pharmaceuticals is helping save human lives through the rapid acceleration of new drug development using Sun Midframe servers, Sun Blade 1000 workstations and Sun 280R Enterprise servers. Since Sun’s product line is based on SPARC and Solaris technologies the entire environment integrates seamlessly, decreasing complexity, contributing to faster time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Comprising Sun Fire 3800, 4800 and 6800 servers, Caprion’s data center represents one of the largest and fastest dedicated protein analysis server banks in the world, capable of analyzing more than one million proteins in the human body and increasing research speed by 20 times.
West McLaren Mercedes, one of the most successful teams in the history of Formula One racing, designs, simulates and revises 3D models of its race cars using Sun Blade 1000 workstations in concert with a Sun Technical Compute Farm. Ninety-five percent of a typical car’s 10,800 components are completely redesigned in any given season utilizing the large memory footprint and 64 bit-computing ability of the Sun Blade 1000. Through the increased compute utilization and superior graphics provided by its Sun solution McLaren can review more iterations of its designs and make critical adjustments to its race cars.
France Telecom, who hosts mission critical Web sites of some of the most popular and prestigious sporting events in Europe, relies on the power and stability of the Sun Fire 280R servers to manage the frequent change in bandwidth load demand. As more fans are now monitoring their favorite events in real-time, promoters must provide an architecture to handle the increased online traffic. The scalability and reliability of the UltraSPARC III processor is critical when demand can reach in excess of 603 million hits for a single event.
About Sun Fire Midframe Servers
The Sun Fire Midframe family of servers have redefined what it means to be a datacenter server, bringing mainframe-class capabilities to the midrange. Spanning the education, retail, life sciences and all other vertical markets, the UltraSPARC III based Sun Midframe server family – comprising the Sun Fire 3800, Sun Fire 4800, Sun Fire 4810 and the Sun Fire 6800 – addresses the needs of customers across both small and large enterprises. Sun Fire servers feature hot-pluggable components, remote monitoring and CPU power control, dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing. From supporting smaller Internet applications to enabling server consolidation and data warehousing, the record-setting Midframe servers provide availability, superior balanced performance and investment protection for the midrange.
About the Sun Fire 280R
The Sun Fire 280R is a rack-optimized server powered by UltraSPARC III technology. This compact, workgroup server provides the reliability, availability and scalability to run financial services, service provider and e-commerce applications. The Sun Fire 280R server, running the robust Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment, delivers enterprise-class features in a compact, rack-optimized package-making it ideal for service providers or enterprise environments where space is at a premium.
About the Sun Blade 1000
The 64-bit Sun Blade 1000, Sun’s first UltraSPARC III workstation, provides the power, reliability and scalability necessary in technical computing’s demanding environments. Offering twice the performance, memory and disk capacity of previous UltraSPARC II- based systems, the Sun Blade 1000 has quickly proven and entrenched itself in such compute-intensive markets as electronic design automation (EDA), mechanical design (MCAD/MCAE), research/development and earth sciences/geosciences.
About the UltraSPARC III Processor
The UltraSPARC III processor, recipient of the Microprocessor Reports’ Analyst’s Choice Award as the 2001 Best Processor for Workstation/Server, delivers massive scalability both vertically and horizontally, proven reliability with integrated features like the Uptime Bus and binary compatibility with applications written for previous versions of UltraSPARC and Solaris technology systems. The UltraSPARC III was designed to deliver multi-dimensional levels of performance in new generations of system products that implement the Net Effect.