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InfiniCon Showcases Power, Scale Of InfiniBand Architecture

InfiniCon Systems, a premier provider of shared I/O and switching solutions for next-generation server networks, announced a series of demonstrations to be done in partnership with leading industry vendors to showcase the unmatched networking advantages of the InfiniBand Architecture Nov. 17-20 at SuperComputing.

InfiniCon's InfinIO family of InfiniBand-based solutions -­ which provides a 10Gbps, low-latency infrastructure for building ultra-scalable computing fabrics, in addition to offering seamless access to existing Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks ­- is featured in the following demonstrations: High Performance Computing: "Teraflops Off the Shelf." InfiniCon's switching and host channel adapter technology are part of a heterogeneous fabric supporting a 192-node, Intel Xeon-based cluster that demonstrates InfiniBand's unparalleled performance and power as an HPC interconnect. Being touted as "Teraflops Off the Shelf," the milestone demonstration utilizes industry-standard components and open source applications from ATI, Callident, Ciara, InfiniCon, Intel, Mellanox, OSU, Sandia, SourceForge, Raritan, Rackable Systems, Topspin and Voltaire to achieve teraflop computing (1 trillion mathematical operations per second) easily and inexpensively.

• Database Clustering with Integrated Network Gateways (Sun Booth # 623): InfiniCon's InfinIO technology is featured in a demonstration with Sun Fire V60x Linux Xeon servers clustered to run an IBM DB2 database application. Through integrated Fibre Channel and Ethernet gateways provided with InfiniCon's switch infrastructure, the InfiniBand-enabled Sun servers will also attach seamlessly to external storage and network clients, illustrating InfiniBand's capability to consolidate I/O over one high-bandwidth connection.
• Grid Computing (Raytheon Booth # 829): InfiniCon's InfinIO 3000 Switch is providing a 10Gbps InfiniBand interconnect for a 16-node cluster (Appro's HyperBlade Cluster) that is part of Raytheon's demonstration of its Grid Broker web portal for managing grid computing resources. Grid Broker -- which enables users to submit, monitor and view the results of computing tasks in queue -- will be interfacing four distributed clusters at SC2003 containing a total of 224 processors.
• High Performance Computing Cluster (AMD Booth # 2219): InfiniCon's InfinIO 2000 Switch is providing a 10Gbps interconnect for an 8-node, Opteron-based server cluster running an HPC weather modeling application via cluster management software from Aspen Systems.
• Dense Computing and Data Center Consolidation (InfiniCon Booth # 2228): InfiniCon's InfinIO 7000 Shared I/O and Clustering System, along with Host Channel Adapter technology from Agilent Technologies, is being integrated with Nexcom's NexBlade HS416 Blade Server (Dual Xeon processors) to demonstrate InfiniBand's complementary advantages for hyperdense computing applications. The InfinIO 7000 will provide the 10Gbps InfiniBand interconnect for an 8-blade cluster, as well as integrated I/O gateways that connect the cluster to network and storage resources. Because it removes the I/O system from server architectures, the InfinIO 7000 enables blade vendors such as Nexcom to design density form factors that are not burdened by masses of complex cabling ­- a major issue when configuring blades to support multiple rack applications.

"Blade computing deployed with an InfiniBand interconnect creates an extremely cost-effective way to deliver slices of processing power, consolidate data center infrastructure, and streamline management," stated InfiniCon Chief Executive Officer Charles Foley. "This level of integration and synergy between an emerging computing form and a flexible infrastructure technology make possible the shift to virtualized computing, where resources that were previously siloed can now behave and be managed as a single, powerful system."

• InfiniBand Benchmark (Ames Scalable Computing Laboratory, Iowa State University, Booth # 329): InfiniCon's InfinIO 2000 Switch is providing the 10Gbps interconnect for a 6-node cluster in a benchmarking demo that features Dell 2650 servers as well as Opteron-based servers. NetPIPE -- a protocol independent performance tool developed by Ames Laboratory to visually represent network performance under a variety of conditions -- will provide a comparison of InfiniBand versus alternative cluster interconnects.