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InfiniBand Technology Demonstrates Extended Computing Resources at SC05

Strategic Insights

— 1 min read

Leading telecommunications and technology organizations, including Cisco Systems, Intel Corporation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Qwest Communications, have collaborated to demonstrate the benefits of InfiniBand technology at the SC05 conference. The conference, sponsored by the IEEE and ACM, showcases high-performance computing, networking, and storage. The demonstration highlights the potential of InfiniBand to provide high-performance, low-latency direct access networking at 10 Gigabits per second over long-distance infrastructure. This technology has become the preferred standard in high-performance computing, grid, and enterprise data centers.

Key Takeaways:

  • The demonstration showcases the ability of InfiniBand to provide high-performance, low-latency direct access networking at 10 Gigabits per second over long-distance infrastructure.
  • The collaboration includes Cisco Systems, Intel Corporation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Qwest Communications, among other organizations.
  • The demonstration highlights the potential applications of long-distance InfiniBand, including remote data center replication, high-performance interfaces to the WAN for IB-based clusters and supercomputers, GRID computing, high-performance media streaming, campus area InfiniBand, and InfiniBand storage.
  • The Longbow XRs from Obsidian Research enable globally distributed InfiniBand fabrics to seamlessly cross-connect by encapsulating 4X InfiniBand over OC-192c SONET, ATM, or 10GbE WANs at full InfiniBand data rates.
  • The demonstration includes a 128-node (512-core) Intel Dual-Core HPC Cluster, which represents a new era of high-performance computing with rapidly increased performance, reduced power, heat, and floor space requirements.
  • The OpenIB Alliance is an industry association chartered to deliver a single, open-source Linux-based and Windows-based software stack for deploying InfiniBand.
  • Industry collaborators, including Cisco Systems, Intel, and Voltaire, are participating in the OpenIB InfiniBand PathForward project, which aims to accelerate the development of hardware and software technologies for high-performance computing.

Statistics:

  • The demonstration will link servers, clusters, storage systems, switches, and optical service platforms over a 50-mile distance.
  • The 128-node (512-core) Intel Dual-Core HPC Cluster delivers a theoretical peak performance of 3.2 teraflops.
  • The OpenIB software stack is designed to support advanced simulation, computing, and visualization across wide area networks.

Sources:

  • Cisco Systems
  • Intel Corporation
  • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
  • Qwest Communications
  • IEEE and ACM (SC05 conference)
  • Obsidian Research (Longbow XRs)
  • OpenIB Alliance
  • Intel Remote Access Service
  • U.S. Department of Energy NNSA ASC PathForward

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