AMD And Sun Microsystems Collaborate To Build Japan’s Largest Supercomputer For Tokyo Institute Of Technology

AMD And Sun Microsystems Collaborate To Build Japan’s Largest Supercomputer For Tokyo Institute Of Technology

At Supercomputing 2005, AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), one of the world’s leading technical institutes, is creating Japan’s largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fireâ„¢ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor cores [totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)], Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC’s integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed’s Advanceâ„¢ accelerator boards. Using Sun’s N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine, the system will be provisioned to support the Solaris 10â„¢ Operating System (OS) as well as the Linux operating environment. It will be used to help science and engineering researchers dramatically increase their productivity. The Tokyo Tech system marks Sun’s largest high performance computing (HPC) win to date. The grid-based supercomputer plans to expand to more than 100 teraFLOPS by its operation in Spring 2006 and is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by Top 500® (http://www.top500.org) in Summer 2006.

“Tokyo Tech’s system will be leveraged by a wide range of researchers within the university and throughout the world,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor in charge of Research Infrastructure at Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. “These researchers are tackling complex problems ranging from analyzing the complex molecular structure of proteins, simulated bloodflow diagnosis in human brains, modeling of the generation mechanism of Earth and planetary magnetic field and their long term effects, to nanoscience simulation of carbon nanotubes —all tasks that require exceptional computing power and experience working with supercomputers.”

“Sun’s ‘Tools for TeraFLOPS’—64-bit innovations that enable rapid deployment of power- and cost-efficient, terascale compute clusters—are helping us make significant headway in the demanding HPC market,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Network Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. “In conjunction with our partners, Sun is able to provide the critical processing power required for the world’s most compute-intense applications while keeping total cost of ownership at a minimum.”

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