ACADEMIA

SilverStorm Technologies, the leader in high performance interconnect solutions for clustered computing, announced today that it has begun customer shipments of its full suite of 9000 series 20Gb/s DDR InfiniBand solutions including the SilverStorm 9240, the industry’s first director class 20Gb/s DDR InfiniBand solution to ship in volume. With a total switching capacity of 11.52Tb/s, the SilverStorm 9240 is also the highest capacity single-chassis cluster interconnect system in the world. The 9000 series products have been selected to support several new supercomputing projects including multiple sites at the US Department of Defense and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Our 20Gb/s InfiniBand DDR systems provide our customers a standards based interconnect solution with outstanding price/performance,” said Reini Florin, SilverStorm’s VP of marketing. “In a single chassis, the SilverStorm 9240 provides twice the switching capacity of other InfiniBand solutions currently shipping and over four times the capacity of the largest 10Gb/s Ethernet switch available.” The recent introduction of multi-core CPU server architectures coupled with PCI Express creates demands on the cluster interconnect that only InfiniBand DDR can efficiently support. InfiniBand DDR is the only interconnect technology available that can saturate a PCI Express x8 link over a single wire. With industry-standard remote direct memory access (RDMA), InfiniBand DDR ensures that precious CPU cycles are allocated to application processing instead of network related tasks. “InfiniBand has grown rapidly in adoption in the cluster interconnect market,” said Addison Snell, IDC’s Research Director of High Performance Computing. “IDC research indicates price/performance is the most significant criterion in selecting a cluster. The availability of DDR capabilities, such as in SilverStorm’s 9000 series, will contribute to users’ reasons for adopting InfiniBand interconnects.” The new SilverStorm 20Gb/s DDR products provide significantly greater performance than today’s 10Gb/s Ethernet switches and proprietary interconnects such as Myrinet and cost a fraction of these interconnects when used to build large fabrics of similar performance. SilverStorm’s new DDR products enable the construction of ever larger, higher performing supercomputing clusters. Commercial customers, universities and government institutions can significantly improve application research accuracy, reduce time to results, and bring products to market more quickly. “The scale and capabilities of SilverStorm’s product line is impressive,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies, the leading supplier of InfiniBand silicon solutions. “SilverStorm's differentiated family of interconnect infrastructure solutions can efficiently support small cluster environments yet also scale to meet the requirements of multi-thousand node supercomputers. We are excited to see deployment of InfiniBand clusters with 20Gb/s performance, low-latency, simplified management, and single-wire, multi-protocol networking capabilities provided by SilverStorm.” SilverStorm’s 9000 product family is a highly integrated solution. Chassis configurations come in 24, 12, 8, and single module versions ranging in size from 14U to 1U. The multi-module chassis units can be populated with any combination of InfiniBand SDR (10Gb/s) switch modules, DDR (20Gb/s) switch modules, or Virtual I/O Controller (VIC) modules. VIC modules enable hosts on InfiniBand fabrics to transparently access either Fibre Channel or Ethernet networks or both. Up to 288 InfiniBand 20Gb/s switch ports, up to 48 10Gb/s Ethernet virtual controller ports and up to 192 Fibre Channel virtual controller ports can be supported in a single chassis. SilverStorm’s QuickSilver High Performance Fabric Access and FastFabric software suite rounds out the solution by providing comprehensive configuration, performance management, diagnostics and control for the overall interconnect fabric.