Three Sun Experts Exchange Views
Writing for the Sun Inner Circle, CIO Bob Worrall discusses the possibilities for the enterprise of social networking. Worrall is joined by Mary Smaragdis, Director of Sun News Network and New and Social Media, and Linda Skrocki, Senior Engineering Program Manager for Sun’s high-volume external-facing community web properties, both social community experts.
Self-contained, Multi-purpose 36-node, QDR InfiniBand Switch Fabric Solution
The Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 36 is a 36-port Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand leaf switch enabling users to bind Sun Blade and Sun Fire servers and storage systems into a 36-node cluster. This multi-purpose switch can act as a self-contained fabric solution for smaller InfiniBand clusters or as a building block for hierarchical fabric topologies supporting larger clusters of Sun Blade or Sun Fire servers and storage systems.
Next-Generation UltraSPARC T2 Processor and Security Coprocessor
The Hot Chips 21 Conference held August 23rd-25th at Stanford University had Sun chip designers discussing the company’s next-generation multithreaded UltraSPARC T2 processor, codenamed “Rainbow Falls,” and a security coprocessor that they say will reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking web sites. Rainbow Falls will feature 16 cores, each with its own L2 cache and four Coherency units. The security coprocessor will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls which will virtually eliminate latency.
For a Scalable, Elastic, Self-provisioning Datacenter 
Sun’s Mikael Lofstrand defines the principles of a new Sun network architecture called VeriScale and demonstrates how it meets the requirements of elasticity, scalability and five other detailed conditions making it ideal for a modern, self-provisioning datacenter. In a soon to be released Sun BluePrints that Lofstrand is authoring and sharing on his blog, he defines the VeriScale architecture including its functional components, its nontraditional method of automation, OpenSolaris Dynamic Service Containers, network optimization and Sun’s service delivery network architecture.
For Variety of Brocade Switches and Directors
Sun is now offering Brocade customers more choices with the addition of Brocade 8Gb/s 10km Fibre Channel SFPs and Brocade 4Gb/s 30km Fibre Channel Extended Long wave SFP for various switches and directors. Brocade 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s SFP’s in both long wave and shortwave lengths can be intermixed.
High-density, QDR, Standards-based, Fully Non-blocking IB Core Switch
The Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 648 is a high-density, Quad Data Rate (QDR) IB core switch that offers capacity for up to 648 servers and storage systems. It can replace up to 152 discrete switching elements and thousands of cables in large-scale solutions, Sun reports. It is an ideal solution for cluster sizes that range from 200 servers to 5000+ servers. This full industry standard Infiniband switching platform fits into a standard 19-inch rack. With an 11u height, up to three switches can be mounted in a single rack for 1,944 4x QDR InfiniBand ports in 33 rack units.
Testing Out-of-box Network Performance
The blog Pure See takes a look at out-of-box performance of Intel Xeon 5500 processor series (Nehalem) on Sun servers running OpenSolaris 2009.06, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Solaris 10 Update 7 using a micro-benchmark tool uperf, which is an open source, network performance tool that supports modelling and replay of various networking patterns. The main purpose of this test is to see if a system can achieve X Gbit/s or send/receive y packets/sec after the workload is characterized.
Sun Constellation System Receives Enhancements, Sets Benchmarks
A new InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) switch, new Sun HPC Software Linux Edition 2.0, Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 3, and enhancements to the Lustre file system were all part of product announcements Sun made during the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference held June 23-26 in Hamburg. These new products improve and expand the Sun Constellation System, which also set new SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, Sun reported.
Also Meet the Sun InfiniBand Dual port 4x DDR PCIe Fabric Expansion Module (FEM)
Sun is introducing its Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand Quad Data Rate (QDR) Switched Network Express Module (NEM) and the Sun InfiniBand Dual port 4x DDR PCIe Fabric Expansion Module (FEM). Expected to be generally available this summer, what these new upcoming Sun products boast are QDR InfiniBand which delivers up to 80 Gb/s bandwidth (full-duplex) per server connection and the ability to enable Sun Blade server modules to be connected to an in-chassis InfiniBand fabric.
Available as Low Profile and Express Module HCAs
Sun InfiniBand Dual Port 4x Quad Data Rate (QDR) PCIe Low Profile Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and the Sun InfiniBand Dual port 4x QDR PCI-E Express Module HCA are built using Mellanox ConnectX silicon, delivering QDR over four times than copper and optical interconnects, Sun reports. Sun’s QDR InfiniBand products enable Sun to offer RDMA-based high-performance, low-latency I/O interconnect technology for its blade and rack mount server platforms.
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