ACADEMIA

Quadrics, the high performance interconnect leader, today announced an alliance with Silicon Graphics under which SGI Professional Services can resell Quadrics QsNetII interconnect solutions to Enterprise and HPC customers purchasing SGI's Altix platform. The QsNetII E-series family of switches is particularly well suited to the recently launched SGI Altix 330 entry level server. It provides an affordable, compact, single chassis solution whilst leaving customers safe in the knowledge that they are purchasing a truly scalable interconnect. QsNetII is capable of meeting the most demanding performance requirements for some of SGI midrange server products also. The delivery of full PCI-X bandwidth and transparent striping over multiple rails (multiple network interface cards in one large multiprocessors node) makes Quadrics ideally suited to SGI's Altix 350 and Altix 1350 products. "Quadric's track record in delivering and supporting high availability scalable systems has made it unique amongst interconnect vendors" commented Cristoforo Romanelli, Quadrics CEO. "The quality and high performance of SGI solutions has been a natural match for our technology" With an MPI latency of less than 2.5 microseconds and a bandwidth of 915 Mbyte/sec Quadrics has already demonstrated its credentials on Intel Itanium 2. Features such as overlapped comms, programmable NIC, factory set hardware offload of MPI collective and broadcast operations and a global virtual memory with one-sided tree reductions for Shmem, all assists in the drop of PCI traffic, free up CPU cycles and lessen the effects of OS noise. "Adding Quadrics to the supported interconnects for SGI Altix Clusters and SGI Altix Hybrid Clusters expands SGI's cluster product portfolio, and Quadrics 2.5 microsecond latency will greatly benefit our latency sensitive customers" said Terry Oberdank, SGI Vice President, Professional Services. Quadrics drivers are included in the SGI Propack performance acceleration package for Linux release (versions 3 and 4). Quadrics hardware also comes with a production-ready open source software stack for HPC clusters.