ACADEMIA

Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, today announced that Canada-based Universite de Sherbrooke has selected Topspin's Server Switch as the fabric for a new world-class computer science data center. The Topspin InfiniBand-based switches will help the university build North America's largest operational InfiniBand cluster to handle the significant computational needs of its science and engineering research, while also delivering superior price/performance. "We had high performance expectations, but limited resources," said Alain Veilleux, Coordinator of the Centre for Computational Science of Universite de Sherbrooke. "We needed to select a vendor that offered good quality products, and had the experience to deploy our solution and a relationship with a Tier-1 system vendor we could trust. After thoroughly evaluating leading vendor proposals, we found that the Topspin InfiniBand-based solution, combined with IBM's dual-Opteron servers, gave us the performance we needed and allowed us to leverage the economic benefits of Linux-based server clustering." Universite de Sherbrooke, one of Canada's leading scientific research institutions and a member of the RQCHP high performance computing consortium, received a grant to build a new supercomputing data center to advance its research in several sciences and engineering disciplines. The applications require extremely fast I/O performance for parallel processing, but the University had to avoid excessive costs. Universite de Sherbrooke is configuring a 468-node dual-Opteron, fully non-blocking architecture using the Topspin 270 and Topspin 120 server switches, running Linux on IBM Opteron e325 servers with 8GB of memory. With InfiniBand as the interconnect technology, the dual-Opteron architecture provides 936 CPUs, making the University cluster North America's largest operational InfiniBand cluster. "Universite de Sherbrooke is demonstrating how organizations -- both research institutions and enterprises -- can benefit from Topspin technology to gain the benefits of high performance computing without all the costs associated with traditional supercomputing environments," said Pat Conte, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations at Topspin. "By providing an open standards, high-performance server interconnect to an entire server cluster, we help customers maximize their performance without breaking their budget."