Sun Defines New Age of Supercomputing: Unveils Midrange HPC Servers With Unmatched Performance, Scalability Availability.

BRUSSELS, Belgium--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 29, 1998--Sun Microsystems, Inc. further solidified its presence in the high performance computing (HPC) market today with the introduction of four new supercomputing-class servers aimed at customers running compute-intensive applications in high performance midrange technical environments.

The Sun(TM) HPC 3500, 4500, 5500 and 6500 servers, running the Solaris(TM) operating system, address the needs of technical, floating point-intensive customers by offering exceptional performance and the best scalability and availability for general-purpose HPC servers in this class.

"Sun is helping to define the new age of supercomputing with a unique approach -- leveraging our stable, industry-leading commercial server business to provide proven, scalable parallel processing technology to HPC customers," said Clark Masters, vice president and general manager of Sun's data center and high performance computing group.

"With the introduction of the new Sun HPC 3500-6500 systems, customers gain significant performance and scalability advantages, as well as unprecedented RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability), on the industry's widest range of binary compatible HPC systems."

As in commercial environments, technical users increasingly need to manage large data sets requiring access to standard database software originally developed for business applications. This convergence of technical and business application requirements necessitates an HPC architectural approach based on general-purpose, scalable, fat-node SMP systems and clusters.

With the delivery of its new HPC systems, Sun continues to deliver on his type of HPC architecture. Sun is leveraging its vision of network computing to build more cost-effective and reliable, yet highly scalable, HPC systems -- helping to unlock the supercomputer and provide its power to a much wider user community.

The Sun HPC 3500-6500 Servers

The new Sun HPC systems scale from one to 30 processors in a single SMP node, and up to 120 processors in a 4-node cluster, offering customers industry-leading scalability and performance. The new servers provide supercomputing-class processing power via 336 MHz UltraSPARC(TM) II CPUs and the new 84 MHz-100 MHz Sun Gigaplane(TM) system bus.

Sun's Gigaplane technology provides the highest bandwidth in the industry for this class of servers, and gives customers investment protection with the ability to add performance enhancements as faster UltraSPARC-based processors are made available for the Sun HPC product line.

In addition, the Sun HPC 3500-6500 systems are the first midrange HPC servers with dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing features for online repair and configuration of system resources and I/O, providing technical users unprecedented levels of system availability and reliability.

With the exception of Sun's Starfire(TM) server, no other systems in this class offer these advanced availability features, which are becoming increasingly important to customers in technical environments.

The Sun HPC 3500 server houses up to eight CPUs in a single node, with up to five slots for fast, easy performance expansion. The system provides internal Sun(TM) StorEdge(TM) fibre channel disk drives with dual-port connections for the higher I/O performance demanded by technical applications.

It also features hot pluggable components, dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing features, and the ability to mirror the internal fibre channel drives, capabilities unmatched by any other eight-way system in this class today. The Sun HPC 3500 system offers 33 percent more power than the Sun HPC 3000 server it replaces, yet maintains the same footprint.

The Sun HPC 4500 server is the line's most compact package for technical users with space concerns, such as customers in the automotive, financial and petroleum sectors, housing up to 14 CPUs and eight system slots in its flexible footprint.

The Sun HPC 5500 server also provides up to 14 CPUs and eight system slots, but in a larger cabinet, while the Sun HPC 6500 server offers up to 30 CPUs and 16 system slots. Both the Sun HPC 5500 and 6500 systems are housed in tall cabinets (68 inches), allowing for more resources and half a terabyte of internal storage via Sun(TM) StorEdge(TM) A5000 fibre channel arrays.

Sun's HPC Momentum and Long-Term Strategy

Since entering the HPC server market last March, Sun has built incredible momentum, appearing on the Top 500 list of supercomputing sites for the first time in June, and rocketing to the number two position for number of systems installed a mere six months later.

Sun recently was awarded a four-year research and development contract by the United States Department of Energy, as part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Pathforward Program, to achieve teraflop/s scale systems.

In addition, the company achieved more than 100 gigaflops (Gflop/s) on the Linpack Highly Parallel Computing Benchmark with a 256 processor, four-node Starfire cluster. Using its new 336 MHz CPU module on the Starfire server, Sun achieved 34.17 Gflop/s on this Linpack benchmark, outperforming comparable systems from SGI, Digital, IBM and HP. Sun's entry into the HPC market has had such an impact on the industry that IDC named it one of the six key events of 1997 in the HPC industry.

Sun's HPC strategy currently is in its second phase. Phase one, announced last year, included large, HPC-enabled SMP systems, tools for developing technical SMP applications, and clusters with standard networks for capacity.

Phase two began in November 1997 with the introduction of clusters for capability and scalability, software tools for developing cluster applications, and links with the higher-performance SCI (scalable coherent interface) interconnect, and continues with today's introduction of higher-performance HPC systems. Phase three, to be introduced in 1999, will include even higher scalability, supporting clusters with up to 16 nodes and a total of 1,024 CPUs.

Sun HPC Product Family

Sun's HPC server family is a line of six high-performance SMP systems with binary compatibility across the company's product line. The Sun HPC server line, which includes the new Sun HPC 3500-6500 systems, leads the industry in reliability and scalability with systems ranging in size from a four-processor Sun HPC 450 system to the 64-processor Sun HPC 10000 system.

The Sun HPC servers are complemented by Sun's HPC 2.0 software, designed specifically for compute-intensive, technical computing environments. Sun's HPC 2.0 software enables both the development and execution of serial and parallelized high-performance applications. It provides middleware to facilitate and manage the workload of highly resource-intensive applications on Sun's HPC servers, as well as clusters of these servers.

Additionally, it provides the software development environment for creating and debugging applications that are parallelized for Sun's HPC servers and clusters.

Sun's current list of HPC customers includes some of the world's leading scientific, government, academic and technical computing organizations, such as: AMOCO Exploration and Production Technology Group, the United States Department of Energy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brazil's CENAPAD-MG-High Performance Computing Center, BSH-Germany's Maritime and Hydrographic Agency, City University of Hong Kong and the University of Cologne.

Pricing and Availability

The new Sun HPC 3500-6500 servers are available immediately. The dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing features for I/O will be available in June, and the dynamic reconfiguration feature for CPUs will be available later this year.

The price for an entry-level HPC 3500 system configured with four 336 MHz UltraSPARC CPUs is $85,400. Sun has enhanced its SGI targeted competitive program to include the Sun HPC 3500-6500 servers, offering product trade-in credits of up to 25 percent on Sun HPC servers when trading in an SGI Challenge, Power Challenge or Origin 2000 server.

About Sun Microsystems

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision, "The Network Is The Computer(TM)" has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW), to its position as a leading provider of high quality hardware, software and services for establishing enterprise-wide intranets and expanding the power of the Internet. With more than $9 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 150 countries on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com. -0-

Note to Editors: Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, Solaris, Gigaplane, Sun StorEdge, Starfire, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. -0-

Press announcements and other information about Sun Microsystems are available on the Internet via the World Wide Web using a tool such as Netscape Navigator or Sun's HotJava. Type http://www.sun.com at the URL prompt.

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