Sun Outpaces High Performance and Technical Computing Market

Building momentum in the high performance and technical computing (HPTC) market, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW) announced it was the only vendor to outgrow the overall HPTC market year-to-year in unit shipments, according to IDC's Q2CY03 Technical Server report.Sun grew 43 percent versus 30 percent for the overall market. This quarter also marked Sun's entry into the Technical Capability segment, which tracks systems configured and purchased to solve the largest, most demanding problems."With our extensive relationship and collaborative model backed by thought leadership and a deep set of HPTC offerings for computation, storage, graphics, software, and services, Sun has re-emerged as a strong force in the HPTC space," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Sun's High Performance and Technical Computing business unit. "Innovative technologies that lead to wins such as the recent $49.7 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) help enable that Sun customers will continue to have access to leading edge technologies and solutions."In the last year, Sun created an organization focused on the HPTC market segment and has scored significant customer wins in government, education, life sciences, manufacturing, oil and gas, and the financial services segment. These include supercluster deployments with the Cambridge Cranfield university consortium in the UK, RWTH Aachen in Germany, Purdue University in the US, and the HPCVL facility in Canada. Other wins include the United Kingdom's White Rose Grid infrastructure and over 8000 sites for Sun Grid Engine software, and high end visualization with Iowa State University, and Berlin's ZIB supercomputing center. In addition, the recent introduction of Sun Fire V60x and V65x servers has fueled strong growth in large x86 cluster deployments.Source: PCBnewsline