Cluster Computing:

VOLTAIRE CLUSTER TECH HELPS CUSTOMERS ACHIEVE TOP500 STATUS

Voltaire customers Mississippi State University, Ohio Supercomputer Center, and Sandia National Laboratories all achieved Top500 status with supercomputer-class clusters networked with Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based interconnect solutions. Voltaire’s solutions deliver industry-leading networking efficiency for increased cluster scalability and server utilization.

The Top500 list, published twice a year prior to the International Supercomputer Conference in June and the Supercomputing Conference in November, ranks supercomputers worldwide according to their performance on the LINPACK benchmark. Voltaire made its debut on the prestigious list with four supercomputer clusters, more than any other InfiniBand systems vendor.

"We congratulate our customers on their success and vision to recognize breakthrough technology," said Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO, Voltaire. "In the past eighteen months we’ve seen InfiniBand evolve from an early stage technology to one that is deployed and in production powering many of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The results of the latest Top500 list underscore the unbeatable scalability and price/performance that only InfiniBand can deliver."

Voltaire interconnect solutions provide the high performance interconnect for four supercomputers on the 23rd edition of the Top500 list. These include:

Mississippi State University in the #158 position; Sandia National Laboratories in the # 211 position; Ohio Supercomputer Center in the #272 position; and Sandia National Laboratories in the #293 position.

The Maverick cluster at the ERC at Mississippi State University is comprised of 192 dual Xeon processor IBM eServer xSeries x335 servers running in a diskless configuration. Connected by Voltaire interconnect solutions, the cluster submitted performance results of 1.4 TFlops. Prior to deploying Voltaire’s interconnect solutions, the ERC used Myrinet and Gigabit Ethernet for its cluster interconnect.

Two clusters from Sandia National Laboratories achieving high ranks in this issue of the Top500 leverage Voltaire interconnect solutions to gain accelerated throughput and enhanced overall performance for key supercomputing initiatives. The Catalyst cluster ranked at #211 consists of 256 P4 Xeon nodes (128 nodes are connected by InfiniBand) and submitted results of 1.076 TFlops. The #293 ranked cluster from Sandia National Laboratories, which consists of 192 Dell PowerEdge Servers with dual Xeon processors (96 nodes are connected by InfiniBand), submitted results of 882 Gigaflops.

The list’s #272 ranking cluster from Ohio Supercomputer Center, which consists of 256 dual Intel Xeon compute nodes (128 nodes are connected by Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based interconnect solutions), submitted results of 933 Gigaflops. This cluster is used to support the OSC’s advanced MPI-based applications.