HPCwire: InfiniBand Becomes Highest Adopted TOP500 Interconnect

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June 19, 2012

InfiniBand Becomes Highest Adopted TOP500 Interconnect

AUSTIN, TX, June 19 -- The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, today announced that, for the first time, InfiniBand has exceeded all other interconnect technologies on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The latest list, available at top500.org, was released June 18 and shows that InfiniBand is now being utilized by 210 out of 500 clusters listed.

InfiniBand growth in recent years includes:

· From June 2008 – June 2012, the total number of InfiniBand-connected systems on the TOP500 list has grown dramatically with an increase of 72 percent from 122 to 210.

· InfiniBand connects 40 percent of the world’s most powerful Petaflop systems on the list, 8 out of the 20 systems.

· InfiniBand connects 25 of the 30 most efficient systems, including the top two.

· 86 percent of the accelerator-based systems are connected with InfiniBand.

This growth highlights how InfiniBand is used to maximize computing and accelerator resources, as well as improves productivity and scalable performance.

FDR InfiniBand™ (Fourteen Data Rate, 14Gb/s data rate per lane) is the fastest growing interconnect technology on the TOP500 with a 10X increase in number of systems versus six months ago. FDR InfiniBand addresses the market demand for increased performance in high performance computing, enterprise, cloud and Web 2.0 networks and is backward compatible with the previous specified InfiniBand speeds – SDR, DDR and QDR – and, together with PCI Express 3.0, provides a step up for clustering and datacenter interconnect throughput, efficiency, reliability and scalability.

“InfiniBand has grown at an incredible rate in the past several years, as we continue to see demand for higher efficiency and lower latency across data centers,” said Bill Lee, InfiniBand Trade Association. “InfiniBand’s growth in HPC mirrors the growth we’re seeing for InfiniBand in the enterprise data center – and specifically for cloud and Web 2.0.”

Created in 1999, InfiniBand enables low processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. As a mature and field-proven technology, InfiniBand is used in thousands of data centers, high-performance compute clusters and embedded environments that scale from two nodes up to clusters with thousands of nodes.

Since June 1993, the TOP500 list has ranked the world’s most powerful computer systems according to the Linpack benchmark rating system twice a year. The list is publicly available at www.Top500.org.  

About the InfiniBand® Trade Association

The InfiniBand® Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Oracle, QLogic and System Fabric Works. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand from an industry perspective through online, marketing and public relations engagements, and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.

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Source: InfiniBand Trade Association

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