Sun Guru Discovers New Constellation

By Doug Barney

Say what you will about Sun Microsystems (Santa Clara, CA), the company is always reinventing itself. Just look at Java, the Network Computer, OpenSolaris, and the Sun Grid. One envelope Sun has never stopped pushing is supercomputing. Late last month Sun announced its latest, greatest, and of course, fastest supercomputer (or massive unified collection of computers) ever built (er, designed) in Santa Clara.

The Sun Constellation System promises “petascale computing” or 1,000 teraflops (and I used to think Mflops were pretty cool). (Here’s a great discussion.)

Constellation, reportedly created by Sun super genius and co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, is driven by more than 10,000 processors and moves along at a nifty 500 teraflops (last time I checked that is half a petaflop, so you’d need two Constellations to match Sun’s petascale hype). In its defense, Sun talks about the petascale potential from clusters of Solaris-based Constellations.

Sun’s system wasn’t built in a vacuum, but was designed with the help of the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin.

What is favorite or least favorite Sun moment or technology? Do we need more risk takers like Scott McNealy? Let us all know by writing [email protected].