Sun powers Idaho cluster

The Energy Department and Sun Microsystems Inc. have developed a high-performance computing cluster at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, company officials said.

The cluster includes more than 230 Sun Fire V20z servers with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron processors and more than 12 terabytes of storage. It runs the Solaris 9 operating system and other Sun products.

"This agreement will vault [the lab] into a position among the world's top high-performance computing sites and offers the ability to complete 2 trillion floating-point operations in a 1 second heartbeat," said William Magwood IV, director of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, in a written statement.

The cluster will allow laboratory workers to support the engineering resources needed for Energy's Generation IV nuclear reactors, Sun officials said.