Sun Constellation System
| Company type | Platform |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder | Sun Microsystems |
| Products | Sun Blade 6048 Modular System, Sun Blade X6275, Sun Blade X6270, Sun Blade 6000 System, Sun Datacenter Switch 3456, Sun Fire X4540, Sun Cooling Doors (5200,5600), OpenSolaris or Linux, Sun Grid Engine, Sun Studio Compiler Suite, Fortress (programming language), Sun HPC ClusterTools, Sun Ops Center |
| Parent | Sun Microsystems |
Sun Constellation System represents an open platform for petascale computing, introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007, specifically tailored for the high-performance computing sector.
Primary hardware elements
- Sun Blade 6048 Modular System
- Sun Blade 6000 System
- Sun Datacenter Switch 3456
- Sun Fire X4540
- Sun Cooling Doors (5200,5600)
Software components
- OpenSolaris or Linux
- Sun Grid Engine
- Sun Studio Compiler Suite
- Fortress (programming language)
- Sun HPC ClusterTools (built on Open MPI)
- Sun Ops Center
Provided services
Operational systems
The largest deployed Constellation system was Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), comprising 3,936 nodes with a total of 62,976 processor cores and achieving a peak computational capacity of 580 TFlops. Upon its introduction, Ranger was ranked as the 7th most powerful supercomputer worldwide in the TOP500 list. After serving TACC for five years, the system was disassembled and repurposed to advance HPC initiatives in South Africa, Tanzania, and Botswana.
In addition to Ranger, multiple smaller-scale Constellation platforms have been installed at various supercomputing institutions, such as the University of Oslo.