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By Stephen Shankland, 18 November 2002 10:05

NEWS Sun Microsystems is taking a major step into supercomputing with the announcement of Fire Link, a technology that joins its high-end servers into a single high-performance cluster. In earlier years, supercomputers were single, massive systems with vast amounts of memory. But since the mid-1990s more and more have been built out of clusters of separate systems connected with high-speed links. At the extreme of this newer trend are 'Beowulf' clusters, with dozens or hundreds of lower-powered Linux servers. With its Sun Fire Link, Sun now is joining IBM and Hewlett-Packard with an alternate approach, offering clusters made of a smaller number of higher-powered computers. The Sun Fire Link technology, code-named "Wildcat," can directly link two or three computers together, said Steve Perrenod, director of high-performance and technical computing at Sun. With the use of a Sun-designed switch, as many as eight computers can be interconnected. Sun has shown more ambition than success with its supercomputer effort, though its presence on the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers more than doubled from 37 systems in June 2002 to 88 this month. The Sun Fire Link adds about five per cent to the price paid for the systems. For example, a Sun Fire Link would cost about $1m for a large cluster with $20m worth of servers, Perrenod said. Sun Fire Link works with Sun's three highest-end systems - the 24-processor Sun Fire 6800, the 52-processor Sun Fire 12K and the 106-processor Sun Fire 15K. Computers in Beowulf clusters are linked with regular Ethernet network cards or special-purpose network cards from companies such as Myricom. The Sun Fire Link, in comparison, uses connections directly to the "backplane" of the Sun Fire system, the high-speed wiring that connects the systems processors together. Using the backplane connection means shorter delays when sending messages from one part of the cluster to another, a way to avoid communication bottlenecks. However, such connections are more unusual and expensive. The Sun Fire Link technology was developed partly through funding from the US Energy Department's Advanced Simulation and Computing Path Forward program, part of a national effort to simulate nuclear weapons tests within computers, Perrenod said. Stephen Shankland writes for News.com