Features:

SMALL TREE TAKES ON INDUSTRY WITH MAC CLUSTERS
by Tim Curns, Editor

The HPC community has been eyeing Apple ever since August 2003, when a Virginia Tech team assembled a high-performance computing cluster of 1,100 G5 Macs for a relatively low-price. The Apple space in HPC is still small, but growing. And the people at Small Tree Communications are basing their livelihood on the assumption that this space will eventually grow much, much larger.

HPCwire's Tim Curns recently spoke with the president of Small Tree Communications, Corky Seeber, about the company's recent advancements in the use of Mac clustering. In October, Small Tree Communications announced the immediate availability of the fastest-ever InfiniBand products available for the Mac.

HPCwire: Corky, many of our readers might not know much about Small Tree Communications. Would you please give us a brief overview of your company, its goals, and vision?

Corky Seeber: Small Tree Communications is a company formed not quite a year and half ago, and our goal is to provide HPC networking solutions to the Mac space. We have a deep background in HPC, as we are all former Cray or SGI employees. We were attracted to the Macs after Apple announced their G5s in combination with their OS X, which is a Unix-based operating system. So we saw a great fit for us, and we thought that Apple had a winner with their new technology.

HPCwire: What has most recently been accomplished with Small Tree?

CS: Our big news is our Infiniband announcement. Small Tree has recently released our software drivers which allow Apple machines to have very high- performance, very competitive with Linux and Windows based machines in the Infiniband space. And, we believe, given how attractively priced the Apple XServe is, the Infiniband solution will be a great for scientific and computational efforts to use Apple based platforms. Infiniband will be the interconnect fabric that will drive that work.

HPCwire: What will this mean for the HPC community?

CS: I think this will benefit the HPC community as a whole. I think a lot of people are paying attention to Apple today that weren't twelve months ago. Gartner is going to announce some numbers showing that Apple is gaining a fair amount of market share with the XServes. For one, I think Apple is committed to it, even though they are learning a little bit as to how to deal in the HPC space, and the 970 processor is extremely power efficient. When you start to put lots of large node clusters together, the total cost of ownership goes down. I think a lot of people are paying attention to that, compared to Itaniums or other available platforms. We believe that there is going to be a growing interest in the Apple platform, and we're hoping to fuel that excitement and drive that forward with our Infiniband-based solution.

HPCwire: Why do you see a tremendous interest and demand for InfiniBand on Mac OS X?

CS: I think Virginia Tech inspired a lot of people to realize that very HPC solutions, a large system cluster, was much more attainable in terms of dollars than ever thought before, because of their price/performance success last November. Effectively, there wasn't a lot of continuation work in the Infiniband space for Apple. There were other companies taking a "wait and see" approach to whether Apple itself would get involved, and they were focusing a little more on the Linux community. At Small Tree we are focused exclusively on Apple, and we feel that we can bring a little bit more to the market. I can tell you that last year, at Mac World, we had several people who were looking at our high-performance networking solutions, when we didn't have Infiniband at the time, come up to us and ask how they could be the next Virginia Tech. I believe that people have been waiting in the Apple space to say, "hey we will support you commercially." Small Tree is attempting to step in and fill that void.

HPCwire: Please explain how Infiniband use has helped bring industry leading network performance to the Power Mac G5 and Xserve G5.

CS: Infiniband as a standard is a very high-performance, low latency interconnect, and very cost effective. The other thing that's nice is that it's platform independent, meaning that it is very easy to have an Infiniband solution where you're talking to a Windows based machine on one side and an Apple based machine on the other. It allows the computer room to be not so much opinionated by type of OS running. So you could have a cluster that's off doing one particular thing and a cluster performing a different function, and they could communicate to each other seamlessly in an open-source standard, not a proprietary solution. This is very attractive to the end-user. So I believe that is part of the reason of driving the acceptance of Infiniband.

HPCwire: How is performance measured here?

CS: Megabytes per second and in latency. We are doing just under 900 MB/s bandwidth on a PCI-X bus, comparable to what is available in the Linux space. Our latency numbers, as measured by Dr. Panda at Ohio State University, is a little over six microseconds. This is a little high compared to where the industry is, although, in all fairness, the industry has had several years to try and tweak out the latency, and we've only been at it for a couple of months. We're very confident that with a bit more development time, we are going to be very competitive on the latency side as well.

HPCwire: Aside from performance, how reliable are the clusters that you are promoting?

CS: We are fairly new, but I would say that we went to the largest Apple customer out there, Virginia Tech, and had them test our code, along with Dr. Panda at OSU, and they said that they found our product to be very stable, reliable, and able to achieve repeatable performance. We know that we can scale quite large, to a large number of nodes out of the chute, so I think that makes us a very strong competitor right out of the gate.

HPCwire: More generally, how do you plan to further advance the use of clusters?

CS: We announced at the beginning of Supercomputing our partnership with InfiniCon. InfiniCon is an established switch manufacturer in the Infiniband space. We are working with them to bring the complete Linux Infiniband stack and make it available to the Apple customer. We are doing that through our partnership with InfiniCon, and our goal is to have products available shortly after the beginning of the new year. These products would have other standard Infiniband-type upper-level protocols like IPoIB, Ethernet and SRP, in addition to MPI.

HPCwire: What obstacles stand in your way?

CS: We are a little bit of an unknown. We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and maybe correct that. But I think there is some trepidation in the industry about how serious Apple is within the HPC space, but we believe that we are forming a tight relationship with Apple to overcome that. We were exhibiting at Supercomputing in the Apple booth to show the strength of the partnership between Small Tree and Apple. I think it's just a matter of getting some more customers and getting the word out there that our product is all we claim it to be.

HPCwire: So would you say those are your major goals for the next year?

CS: I think that's fair. We're basically just trying to grow our customer base, increase the depth of our product offering...as I told the people who stopped at the Apple booth, if someone is looking at putting in an HPC cluster, my goal is to take away any reason not to consider Apple over a Linux solution. I'm going to build the Apple solution to the point that the only difference is because someone has a personal preference -- not because there is a feature missing on the Apple side or that there is performance difference where Apple is in a negative light. We're going to push the Apple solution as best we can.

HPCwire: What sets STC apart from competitors?

CS: We are focused exclusively on the Apple space. Infiniband players today, for the right reasons, have been focused on where the real market growth has been -- the Linux space over the last few years, and to a lesser a degree, the PC space, because of how intrusive it is in the marketplace. Apple is kind of a johnny-come-lately in terms of the G5 being a platform that can really take Infiniband performance and deliver it to the application. Until VA Tech, a lot of people were skeptical about whether Apple was a real HPC play or not.

So, with Small Tree being focused on the Apple space and not worried about Linux, we think that any Apple customer that is looking at doing this would be interested in working with us. If we don't make this happen work on Apple, we're out of business. If you divide the whole marketplace up, people argue that Apple has got 3-5% of the IT pie. For us, we just want to be the dominate player in that 5%.

HPCwire: Why the concentration on Macs? What sets them apart from PCs in regards to what you're trying to accomplish?

CS: There are several things that set Macs apart. Viruses, obviously, are a big thing that people are paying attention to today. I think the OS X is more intuitive. The people who tend to be creative -- the graphic arts, the pre- press industry folks -- tend to like the Apple interface because it seems to make more sense without having to be quite the "computer geek." Creative people seem to spend a lot of time not having to worry about that, they just want to use their computer as a tool and not get into the actual "coolness" of the tool. The "coolness" comes in how easy it works.

I also think that Apple is providing a true 64-bit high performance solution, with more performance per dollar to the desktop than what you can get available with PCs today.

HPCwire: What market segments do you hope to affect or play a role in?

CS: Typically, there is going to be opportunities in education, probably our leader right now because of the Virginia Tech experience, but we expect to make inroads with DoD or government. We're also looking to crack into some of the commercial verticals that tend to be computer intensive. Pharmaceuticals might be one, automotives might be one -- it just depends. Once we establish ourselves a little bit stronger in the educational space, and we do have some opportunities we're working in the DoD space.

HPCwire: But it may be too early to tell right now?

CS: You know, you can list the five primary non government verticals -- education, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and scientific discovery. You have to splinter that into biomedical, for example, which is a now a big field and could potentially be something that we could go after too. But you have to pick one, establish a foothold and start spreading out.

HPCwire: Is there any room in the Grid arena for STC?

CS: There is a potential that we might be able to do something in the Grid arena. We haven't focused on it yet, it's still something that we may spend some time with, but it's not short term. It's probably a medium-range thing that we are going to start to look at a little bit more in-depth.

HPCwire: Is there anything else you'd like to specifically address?

CS: The main point I want to make to you and your readers is that we intend to be the Mac network experts. We're very focused and interested in driving into the HPC space. The only comment I didn't make, which I think would be of interest to your readers, and this is my opinion, for what it's worth... I think the HPC space is at a crossroads. I say that because there has been a lot of IA-32 infrastructure that has been built that is starting to get long in the tooth. I think folks who are trying to make the decision how to move from IA-32 are saying, "Ok, how am I going to to move to the next level?" People want to move to 64-bit architectures because it's out there now in a couple flavors and they have to decided that they want that to be part of their next solution. I think because of that, that enables Apple's offering to be considered a bit more highly than it would have been a year or two ago. The IA-32 wave is kind of on the backside now, and people are looking at how to make that next-generation move. So, we think there are a few things converging here that bodes well for Small Tree and our expertise.

HPCwire: Thanks for letting us know a bit more about your company, Corky. We will continue to monitor the growing use of Mac clusters in the HPC environment.

Small Tree Communications provides enterprise networking solutions to the Mac. Small Tree Communications brings new technology peripheral products to meet the demanding application requirements of Mac customers. In addition to InfiniBand products, the company also offers copper and optic-based multi-port gigabit Ethernet cards, 10Gb Ethernet adapters and IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation software for the Mac.