ACADEMIA

High Performance, Low Latency InfiniBand to Power Bladed System: Voltaire, a leading provider of grid backbone solutions, today announced that the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences has selected Voltaire Grid Backbone solutions for an IBM supercomputer that will be used for scientific research in the areas of physics, chemistry, engineering and computational pharmacy. The system, which was unveiled today, is designed to accelerate the performance of the Center's ongoing research projects ranging from determining the structure of atomic particles to aerodynamic design and drug discovery. The sixteen teraflop IBM System Cluster 1350 will be built with IBM HS21 blade servers with dual core Intel Xeon processors running on a high performance, low latency 10 Gbps InfiniBand fabric from Voltaire. The InfiniBand fabric consists of Voltaire InfiniBand Pass Through Modules and host channel adapters (HCAs) for IBM BladeCenter within the blade server platform and Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 multi-service switches for external connectivity. The new supercomputer can process 16.3 trillion calculations per second which qualifies it to rank among the top echelon of the world's most powerful supercomputers. "We're deploying a world class information system to advance the University of Kentucky's leadership in the area of scientific research. This system will speed up discovery time on important research that improves lives," said University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. "The new supercomputer from IBM and Voltaire enables us to scale and deliver critical information faster than ever before." The new supercomputer will also be a resource to GridChem, a national grid for computational chemistry. Funded by the National Science Foundation, GridChem is a consortium to advance research and discovery in the field of chemistry that includes the University of Kentucky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Louisiana State University, the University of Texas, and Ohio State University "University of Kentucky's new supercomputer is a state-of-the-art solution that delivers speed, performance and scalability to enable researchers and businesses to tackle highly complex problems," said Wendy McGee, director, IBM Cluster Solutions. "IBM Cluster 1350 featuring Voltaire InfiniBand creates a powerful and high performance solution that is also cost effective and addresses the power, cooling and cost-savings requirements of today's data centers." "We look forward to an innovative and productive partnership with University of Kentucky and IBM with the installation of this new supercomputer," said Peter Waxman, Vice President of sales, Voltaire. "By selecting Voltaire InfiniBand as the high performance interconnect researchers will be able to run complex calculations faster and more efficiently." University of Kentucky selected the system from IBM and Voltaire based on price performance, scalability, and its ability to solve space, power and cooling issues.