HPCwire: InfiniBand, OpenFabrics Enterprise Used in 42 Percent of Fastest Supercomputers

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November 16, 2011

InfiniBand, OpenFabrics Enterprise Used in 42 Percent of Fastest Supercomputers

SEATTLE, Wash. Nov. 15 -- The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) and the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) today announced that 42 percent of the world's most powerful computers listed on the TOP500 (www.top500.org) published this week at SC11 are using InfiniBand and the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED).

InfiniBand and OFED connect the leading supercomputers in the world, including five of the TOP10 and the majority of the TOP100 with 55 percent, the TOP200 with 59.5 percent and the TOP300 with 50.7 percent. The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the TOP500 list has grown 24 percent year over year. InfiniBand and OFED-based system performance grew 44 percent from November 2010 to November 2011. This year marks the first appearance of FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand on the TOP500 list, illustrating the realization of the InfiniBand Trade Association's roadmap.

Worldwide adoption and deployment of OFED with all Linux distributions and Windows -- supporting both InfiniBand and Ethernet -- is increasing. OFED helps RDMA-based networks provide computing efficiencies as high as 96 percent and latencies as low as 1 microsecond, and supports speeds up to 56Gb/s for InfiniBand and 40Gb/s for Ethernet. OFED also reduces data center power consumption up to 50 percent. OFED works with all current Linux distributions and Windows, network media technology independent, supports all commodity processor technologies as well as all common storage access methods. OFED is evolving towards applications that require extremes of performance, exascale-level scalability and utility-class reliability.

"InfiniBand and OFED are experiencing growing adoption by vendors and users worldwide," said Brian Sparks, co-chair of the IBTA and OFA Marketing Working Group. "This year the IBTA and OFA have collaborated in our SC11 booth to demonstrate a 'world's first' in terms of 40Gb/s data transfer rates over a long distance. This demo provides insight into the types of InfiniBand and OFED-enabled solutions you'll see moving forward, as well as how RDMA communication opens new possibilities for collaboration among researchers by enabling quick and efficient data sharing."

The TOP500 list (www.TOP500.org) is published twice a year and ranks the most powerful computers worldwide, providing valuable statistics for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures.

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.

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is a 501c) (6) non-profit association that develops, tests, licenses and distributes the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) -- multi-platform, open-source software for high-performance, low-latency and energy-efficient computing. OFED is used in business, research and scientific environments that require fast and efficient networks, storage connectivity and parallel computing. OFED is free and is included in major Linux distributions, as well as Microsoft Windows. In addition to distributing OFED, the OFA conducts training, workshops and interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multivendor enterprise requirements for security, usability and reliability. For more information about the OFA, visit www.openfabrics.org.

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Source: OpenFabrics Alliance

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