Sun’s Constellation to takle ove IBM’s Blue Gene

Sun Microsystems Inc. is aiming to get over the IBM’s Blue Gene.
The design provides 21 million floating-point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 PFLOPS. IBM already has a 3 PFLOP version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the No. 2 spot.

Sun's Constellation will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.

The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec., and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.
The benefit of a big switch is that interswitch cables and the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.
It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.
According to Sun the Constellation could scale to a 2 PFLOP system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay, though.

IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.

It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 PFLOP and could be configured to reach 3 PFLOPS.IBM suggests that a home user would need a 1.5-mile-high pile of laptops to have the equivalent of 1 PFLOP of computing power.