Going head-to-head with the announcement of IBM’s new Blue Gene/P is Sun Microsystem’s own petescale supercomputer called “Constellation” – the result of a collaboration between Sun and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin.

According to Sun, the Constellation system “combines ultra-dense, high-performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics.”

On the software side, the Constellation shares the same open computing environment as other Sun systems, and also uses the Solaris 10 operating system.

"Sun Constellation System provides customers with the most open HPC architectures existing in the market today," said Bjorn Andersson, Director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. "Bringing OpenSolaris and other open source software to the forefront of the HPC market, Sun is ushering in a new era of HPC computing. For customers, this means being able to now leverage the reliability and security of the Solaris 10 OS coupled with the massive scalability of the Sun Constellation System."

The Constellation is a 421 teraflop design, according to Techworld, but can potentially scale to 2 petaflops. TACC will play host to the first Constellation system, initially with 6,576 quad-core AMD Opterons providing 26,304 processing cores paired with 52.6TB of RAM. The system will later expand to 1,302 processors providing 52,608 cores and 105TB RAM.

Although the term “constellation” refers to things off-world, Sun’s new supercomputer is designed for complex, earthly applications such as climate, weather and ocean modeling. Researchers can use the Sun Constellation to test next-generation weather forecast codes with long-term climate modeling. Researchers can also run earthquake and seismic simulations with higher resolutions and more accurate modeling of wave propagation to gain further insight into earthquake scenarios.