In another corner sits IBM's famous Blue Gene, which currently has the title of Fastest Supercomputer in the World with a performance of some 360 teraflops.

At the International Supercomputing Conference currently taking place in Dresden, Germany, Sun is offering glimpses of its Sun Constellation System, which it described as "one of the world's first open petascale computing environments."

In boxing terms, Sun's demonstrations are equivalent to the challenger showing his stuff at training camp before taking on the champ.

Up to 1.7 Petaflops

Sun said that the Constellation System, the first implementation of which is Ranger, is "expected to be one of the most powerful computing platforms in the world." And if its specs hold up, it could topple Blue Gene from the perch it has been occupying.

When Ranger is up and running at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, and joins with fellow supercomputers on the TeraGrid national network in late 2007, it is expected to deliver a peak performance of more than 500 teraflops. Constellation environments can eventually be configured to provide as much as 1.7 petaflops. A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second, and a petaflop is one quadrillion.

Putting that in cost-performance terms, Sun cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim has said that computing has now reached the level of a teraflop for under a hundred thousand dollars.

When it is complete, Ranger will have 1.7 petabytes of storage capacity using Sun Fire X4500 data servers, and over 15,000 quad-core microprocessors connected by a Sun InfiniBand switch. The Sun Grid Engine will dynamically allocate resources.

'Secret Sauce'

But toppling the Big Blue legend is not the main aim of this latest monument to computing power . Ranger is designed for applications that would thwart mere mortal computers, such as longer forecasts for climate, weather, and ocean modeling, and earthquake and seismic simulations.

One of Ranger's biggest impacts, though, might be the way it is built. Sun said it is constructed with open technologies, and its reusable components can be used to build both small and large High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.

Bjorn Andersson, Sun's director of HPC systems, revealed that the "secret sauce" is innovation at the system level. "It enables us to radically reduce the amount of complexity for petascale level clusters," he said, "making them easier to deploy and manage, and more efficient to own and operate."

The Constellation System, according to the company, is also efficient in terms of power and cooling , needing less energy to run than comparable systems.

In fact, Sun is expecting smaller configurations to be used in a more down-to-earth fashion for businesses, such as for transaction processing, data mining, product design, or market forecasting.