by Michael Van De Vanter, Alan Wood, Chris Vick, Stuart Faulk, Susan Squires and Lawrence G. Votta Jr.

July 23, 2009- Supercomputing seeks solutions to computational problems whose scale, in both complexity and size, stretches the limits of our technology. Typical supercomputer applications include weather modeling, crash simulation, hydrodynamic modeling, and encryption. Today's most powerful supercomputers are rated in PetaFLOPS - quadrillion floating point of operations per second.

Recently, however, the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community has begun to realize that escalating hardware performance is, by itself, contributing less and less to real productivity, which is defined as the ability to develop and deploy high-performance supercomputer applications at acceptable time and cost. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative challenged industry vendors to design a new generation of supercomputers that would deliver a 10x improvement in this newly acknowledged but poorly understood domain of real productivity.

Sun Microsystems, choosing to abandon customary evolutionary approaches, responded with two revolutionary decisions. The first was to investigate the nature of supercomputer productivity in the full context of use, which includes people, organizations, goals, practices, and skills as well as processors, disks, memory, and software. The second decision was to rethink completely the design of supercomputing systems, informed by productivity-based requirements and driven by recent technological breakthroughs. Crucial to the implementation of these decisions was the establishment of multidisciplinary, closely collaborating teams that conducted research into productivity and developed the many closely intertwined design decisions needed to meet DARPA's challenge.

This report describes Hero, a revolutionary petascale supercomputer designed to deliver an order of magnitude increase in productivity rather than just faster hardware. It also describes Sun's interdisciplinary, highly collaborative design process, without which the goals could not have been achieved.