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Sun Microsystems announced today that one of the largest technical
universities in Europe has selected its Sun Fire 6800 servers running the Solaris Operating Environment as well as Sun’s GRID
Engine networking software to build one of the largest supercomputers in the world.
Aachen site selected as Sun Center of Excellence for computational fluid dynamics.
The University of Technology (Rheinisch-Westflische Technische Hochschule – RWTH) at Aachen selected the Sun computing platform over
rivals, IBM, SGI, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. As one of the biggest SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) clusters in the world, the system’s
integrated graphics and GRID computing will support large computational fluid dynamics simulations, as well as other compute-intensive
applications. With the computing power of 2.3 Teraflops, trillions of floating point operations per second, in its final stage in 2002, the
supercomputer at Aachen represents Sun’s largest high performance computing (HPC) installation to date.
“We chose Sun for their computational power, extensive software offering and versatility,” said Christian Bischof, Professor for
high-performance computing at the RWTH. “Sun’s Sun Fire servers will allow us to boost current HPC applications, champion new HPC
opportunities and function as a computing portal for researchers at the University and in the State of Northrhine-Westphalia.”
As one of the leading technical universities in Europe, RWTH Aachen has been selected as the Sun Center of Excellence for Computational
Fluid Dynamics. “Adopting the role as Sun Center of Excellence provides Aachen with exposure as an institution that is advanced in its use of
technology, and expands future partnership opportunities with Sun’s Global Education and Research group as Sun continues to drive massive
scalability for Internet based applications,” said Joerg Schwarz, Manager for Scientific & Engineering Computing, Global Education & Research at
Sun.
The installation of 32 Sun Fire 6800 servers will be staged over the next two years, starting in April 2001.
