ACADEMIA

Agreement Makes InfiniBand Available to Sun Customers Worldwide; New Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage Offering To Include Voltaire InfiniBand: Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, announced that the company has entered into a global agreement with Sun Microsystems that brings Voltaire’s products into Sun’s portfolio of technologies for building integrated high-performance computing systems. Included in the terms of the agreement are Voltaire’s InfiniBand and multi-service director-class switches, host channel adapters and software, which Sun will use in pre-designed, factory-integrated solutions. The combined solution enables customers to gain industry-leading performance and scalability for their clusters and grids. One of Sun’s key factory-integrated offerings for high-performance computing is the Sun Grid Rack System. The Sun Grid Rack System is a ready-to-deploy system with Sun servers, networking options and grid-ready software, delivered in a Sun rack. With a flexible, open architecture design, Sun Grid Rack Systems simplify the deployment and adoption of grid computing architectures. Voltaire multi-service Grid Director switches offer integrated InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity in a single enclosure and are deployed successfully in many of the world’s largest supercomputers and grids. Voltaire technology is also part of the new Sun Grid Rack System model designed for storage grids. The Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage combines the innovative Sun Fire X4500 hybrid data server, Sun StorageTek arrays, Voltaire InfiniBand fabrics, and the Lustre cluster file system, to ensure great scalability for data access at remarkable price-performance levels. “Sun and Voltaire share a goal of delivering the highest-performance, complete cluster and grid solutions to our customers,” said Bjorn Andersson, Director for HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. “The new Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage is an example of our collaboration, and adds to the great momentum we have in the market place with integrated products. We are now pleased to provide more options for integrating InfiniBand technology with the products from Voltaire.” “While Sun and Voltaire have collaborated for quite some time to deliver high performance clusters and grids to customers worldwide, we are very pleased to take the next step by announcing the global agreement,” said Mark Favreau, president and head of worldwide sales for Voltaire. “We look forward to building on our relationship with Sun to deliver ultra high performance, innovative, yet easy-to-deploy solutions to our customers.” Sun and Voltaire Power Supercomputers at Leading HPC Institutions Worldwide Clemson University, University of Cologne and Japan’s Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have selected the Sun solution with Voltaire InfiniBand to deliver industry-leading performance to their mission-critical applications. “Clemson University chose a Sun Microsystems HPC system and Voltaire’s state-of-the-art InfiniBand solutions to build a world-class simulation facility for the automotive and aviation industries,” said James H. Leylek, Ph.D, Director, Advanced Computational Research Laboratory, Clemson University. “The solution will help address technical problem areas as diverse as computational aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, acoustics, materials, manufacturing, electromagnetism, wireless communications and others.” “We selected Sun Fire x64 servers and a Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand-based switch to develop a 128-node cluster to run computational analysis,” said Professor Ulrich Lang, Director of the Center for Applied Informatics, University of Cologne. “By leveraging 10 Gbps InfiniBand as the server interconnect, we have built a high performance, scalable cluster that allows us to tackle complex calculations faster and more efficiently than ever before.” Tokyo Tech selected Sun servers and Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based Grid Director switches to power Japan’s largest supercomputer, which is used for computational scientific research. The Tokyo Tech system is one of the top ten largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by the Top500 (www.top500.org) and was built using Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processor cores, connected by multiple Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 switches. Voltaire solutions are Solaris-Ready and have been certified on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Voltaire products for Sun integrated solutions are available today through the Sun Customer Ready Systems program.