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If TACC can get enough Barcelona chips from Advanced Microsystems by October 15, its system will land near the top of the next Top 500 Supercomputers list, Sun says.

Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops, has 100T bytes of memory, and an I/O speed (the speed at which data can be moved in and out of the central processing unit) of 3T bytes per second. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes.

Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun.
Constellation is targeting IBM, which held an industry-leading 47.8 percent market share on the earlier Top 500 list, because its Blue Gene line is "the fastest machine out there," Bechtolsheim acknowledged. But Sun's Constellation is built with open industry-standard components, such as x64 processors, Sun blade servers, Sun Fire x4500 storage, and open source Solaris or Linux operating system software, while IBM's Blue Gene is built from custom-made components.