Nevertheless, HP completed the full SPEChpc benchmark suite runs at the small and medium dataset levels within a single day, complying with the testing parameters. A few lab hiccups aside, the BladeSystem c-Class is an impressive piece of engineering. The wide variety of blade options, including the disk-only blades; up-front display; adaptive power and cooling features; and density show that the c-Class definitely adheres to HP's 'Invent' slogan.

Sun Blade 8000 Modular System

Although the other blade solutions in our test ranged in size from 7U to 10U, Sun's system came in the door at a whopping 19U. Of course, Sun's take on blades is a little different: It was the only blade solution to support four CPUs per blade, and can handle 10 blades per chassis. With dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs, this equates to 160 cores in a single 42U rack.

That rack had better have plenty of power and cooling, though, as the Sun Blade 8000 draws a significant amount of juice, requiring approximately 9kW (actual draw is generally lower). That's quite a lot compared with the HP and Dell blades, which pull roughly 3.6kW each. Luckily, the Sun system's density makes up for its power thirst.

It took Sun's engineers quite some time to get the tests up and running, and the Sun Blade 8000's results in the SPEChpc benchmark weren't the best. They did better in the SPECseis test, and I'm certain that if they were given more time to optimize the other two tests, Sun's overall results would have been much better.