Sultan Qaboos University gets HPC from Sun

The HPC System will allow researchers at the University to work on a range of computationally-challenging science and engineering applications that require computing power beyond the limited capabilities of the PC-based computing facilities currently available in the various colleges at SQU.

Built to suit SQU's requirements, the HPC system was delivered by Sun in a pre-integrated form and needed minimal assembly work at the university during deployment. The system is being used for research such as modeling, simulation and scientific calculations, and teaching.

"The university has an extensive IT infrastructure that provides the necessary IT facilities and services that a modern day university requires,"

says Dr. Muataz Al-Barwani,HPC Facility Coordinator, Sultan Qaboos University.

"Most of these facilities and services are housed and provided by the Universities' Centre for Information Services (CIS) and its staff. But, despite the available facilities and services, a need still existed for a high performance computing facility," he added.

Adds Dr. Al-Barwani, "Many factors contributed to our choice of vendor, including a specification that met our needs, total cost of ownership and more importantly; the high level of support for the product. Sun met all these requirements and the offering was the best in terms of overall performance it was going to provide. It exceeded what any other vendors had offered."

As part of Phase I of the project Sun deployed SUN 6000 HPC Blade Cluster. The cluster is configured using Intel Xeon processors, low latency and high throughput DDR InfiniBand fabric. The workload resources are managed by the Sun Grid Engine resource manager. The system includes SUN HPC cluster tools, Sun Studio 12 Compilers and other development tools.

"Over the past few years Sun's market share in high performance and technical computing has increased significantly, in this region, due to our broad HPC product line and focus especially in Education & Research sector. This particular solution will pave the way for a new generation of computationally intensive applications be utilized at SQU," said Peter Avakian, HPC Technical Lead, Sun Microsystems.

"It will help run more sophisticated simulation in parallel, enabling SQU to the pursuit of progress in science and engineering to advance their educational initiatives," Avakian added.