Sun announced its rack based Cooling Door systems as part of raft of blade server and other hardware product announcements.

The company said that the cooling system, previously known as "Project Glacier," offered six times more efficient rack cooling than standard data center cooling systems and would cut energy consumption and increase effective compute density by up to 70 percent over in-row cooling options.

In a statement the company said: "Designed for up to 35kW per rack, the Sun Cooling Door system fits in the rear of the updated Sun Blade 6048 chassis. It has the highest cooling efficiency and capacity in a 100 percent passive design that does not require additional fans or electrical power to function. Available as either the Sun Cooling Door 5200, which leverages existing chilled-water infrastructure, or the Sun Cooling Door 5600, which utilizes eco-friendly refrigerant gas, these advanced cooling systems remove heat at the source, require minimal data center footprint and can help avoid costly data center makeovers."

The server launch included a dual-node Intel 5500 series Sun Blade X6275 server with the Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate (QDR) Network Express Module (NEM), the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, the Sun Cooling Door system, the Lustre file system and Sun's Open Storage portfolio. The Sun Blade server nodes can run Linux, Windows, Solaris or OpenSolaris. Sun Blade X6275 server module delivers 48 physical blades per rack -- supporting 96 nodes of two-socket, quad-core processors per node, resulting in a total of 768 processor cores and nine teraFLOPS of peak performance in a single 42U rack. This represents up to 71 percent more cores/rack than IBM (as compared to the IBM BladeCenter H) and 50 percent more cores/rack than HP, Sun claimed. With 2.25 teraFLOPS of peak compute capacity and Linpack efficiency of 89 percent per every shelf of 12 blades, customers can expect up to two teraFLOPS of actual computational power.

Sun also announced a family of Networking Solutions to optimize per-node performance and system-wide scaling for application communications and I/O. Using these solutions, customers can dramatically simplify their environment from less highly integrated solutions -- reducing cabling by 84 percent, switches by 97 percent, and rack space by 75 percent, it said.

"Slow pipes and slow storage have limited high performance computing systems for years. The solution is to evolve the industry's view of high performance computing today to include high performance I/O and networking," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Our Open Network Systems approach first solved this problem with the Sun Constellation System. Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges."