Roger Smith, senior systems administrator at Mississippi State University's High Performance Computing Collaboratory, recently installed a Sun system with 500 Sun Fire x2200 servers with 1,024 AMD Opteron dual-core processors running Solaris. Smith said the university opted for a prebuilt system developed by Sun Customer Ready Systems' CRS program as part of a joint demonstration project with Sun. The result was an affordable system, he said, without disclosing the price.

The hardware was set up in a day, and the only thing it needed was some networking hookups that weren't ready when the system was delivered, said Smith. His major concern was whether Sun would configure the system exactly as the school wanted it. He visited a Sun facility in Oregon "to assure ourselves that they were going to do a good job ... as we wanted it." The system has been up for two weeks now, and Smith said he's happy with it.

Hewlett-Packard Co. leads the HPC industry, with about 33 percent of the market, but IBM, at 28 percent, dominates sales at the high end with large enterprise machines such as its Blue Gene system. In third place is Dell Inc., at 17 percent, followed by Sun, at about 10 percent, according to IDC.

In 2000, Unix-based operating systems dominated HPC use; today, the Linux operating system accounts for 65 percent of the market. But Snell warned that independent software vendors are beginning to feel pressure from users to optimize to one vendor's version of Linux versus another. The irony is that the Linux market is beginning to head in the direction of Unix, with multiple flavors of the operating system, Snell said.

Despite shifting operating systems, the major users of HPC systems remain academics and life sciences, and government laboratories, according to Snell.