Using Sun Fire V20z servers based on the AMD Opteron processor running the Solaris 10 Operating System and Linux, SLAC was able to demonstrate completely filling a 10Gbps transcontinental network path for a sustained time with standard 1500Byte packets, and the team achieved over 15Gbps (9.43Gbps in one direction and 5.65Gbps in the reverse direction simultaneously) on a single 10Gbps wavelength path. In addition, the team successfully showed smooth communications at multi-Gbps rates between multiple operating systems and different vendor Network Interface Cards. The Bandwidth Challenge results prove the efficiency and robustness that an operating system can deliver, as well as the power and flexibility of two and four-way servers from Sun built with the AMD Opteron processor and 10 gig Ethernet cards from S2IO and Chelsio.
The High Energy Physics (HEP) community is in the midst of running a new round of experiments to probe the fundamental nature of matter and space-time, to help us understand the origins of the universe. These experiments require working with volumes of complex data that need collaboration among scientists around the world. The performance achievements in the Bandwidth Challenge show not only an increase in overall throughput, but one Sun Fire V40z server achieved I/O Ethernet performance of nearly 12Gbps when configured with Solaris 10 OS and two S2IO network cards. These accomplishments help make it faster and easier for SLAC to transfer large amounts of data for research and collaboration.
Sun unveiled Solaris 10 at its recent Network Computing '04 event. Representing 3,000 engineering years and a $500 million-plus R&D investment, Solaris 10 is the fastest operating system ever released by Sun -- applications can run up to 30 times faster and web server performance is more than 40 percent faster than Solaris 9 in web server performance on both SPARCŪ and x86 systems. Sun plans to make Solaris 10 available as a free download by January 31, 2005.
SLAC recently announced the purchase of 360 Sun Fire(TM) V20z servers based on the AMD Opteron processor for use in advanced research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The center also uses more than 1000 SPARC architecture-based systems and 400TB of disk from Sun which are dedicated to SLAC physics and computer science research. The center plans to use a portion of the AMD Opteron processor-based systems to validate the use of a Large Memory System to resolve disk latency and bottlenecks, ultimately delivering a revolutionary increase in scientific productivity.
