Sun and Boeing Speed Research Data

April 5, 2007: Sun Microsystems and Boeing are teaming up to launch a new open architecture that they say will enable organisations to collect, process and store massive amounts of data at unheard of speeds.

Sun subsidiary Sun Microsystems Federal and Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit say that the technology is capable of sustained processing of more than 10 gigabits of data per second and is designed to foster data analysis, sharing and decision making.

To put this in perspective, the two say that 10 gigabits per second is equivalent to processing 250 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare or 125 chest x-rays in one second.

The companies are targeting the technology at experimental analysis and simulations in scientific disciplines such as high- energy physics, climate modelling, earthquake engineering, astronomy, human genomics and the development of nano-scale electronic devices. In these areas massive amounts of data needs to be shared by a community of hundreds or thousands of researchers distributed worldwide, making transmission speed paramount.

“This collaboration will enable us to provide images to our geospatial and intelligence customers faster, more cost effectively, and in a higher resolution than ever before,” says Brian Knutsen, general manager of Boeing Mission Systems, Boeing's centre for data collection, imaging and archiving.

“More and more organizations need a computing architecture that enables real-time access to data at speeds of 10 gigabytes per second,” added Evan Harrigan, Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems. “Sun and Boeing have designed an architecture that provides both real-time access and redundancy, eliminating a single point of failure.”

The system comprises of:

• Sun Fire E25K Server
• Sun StorageTek Flexline FLX380 Disk Storage
• Cisco 9509 Fiber Optic Director Switch
• Solaris Operating System
• Sun StorageTek QFS software for High-Speed Data Access
• Tivoli SANergy for Simultaneous Reading & Writing of Data

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