ACADEMIA

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), a research facility at The University of Texas at Austin, and Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, today announced that TACC has selected Topspin's Switched Computing System as a planned key component of its high-performance visualization cluster. TACC will initially deploy the Topspin 90 Switched Computing System and Topspin's InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel gateways to seamlessly interconnect high-performance graphics workstations into a visualization cluster to power its world-class visualization laboratory. The Topspin 90 will also enable this cluster to connect to TACC's storage area network (SAN). The Topspin 90 is the industry's only entry-level, 1U InfiniBand switching solution with built-in Ethernet or Fibre Channel expansion capabilities for local area networks (LANs) and SANs. TACC is one of the nation's leading academic advanced computing centers. TACC activities span the spectrum of academic, government, and commercial research, including research and development for the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. Hundreds of scientists use TACC resources for computational research in diverse areas including chemistry, physics, biology, engineering, and geosciences--especially related to petroleum modeling and engineering. "TACC is excited to leverage InfiniBand to build highly-scalable visualization and compute clusters out of industry-standard servers," said Dr. Jay Boisseau, TACC director. "We are eager to take advantage of this extremely fast, standards-based interconnect. We chose Topspin because they have a complete, high-performance InfiniBand clustering solution for integrating our clusters nodes and our SAN." Topspin's switch includes an InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel gateway which provides a virtual Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) to each of the clustered servers over InfiniBand. This allows all cluster and storage traffic to run over the same 10Gigabit pipe to each server. And, by eliminating the need for physical HBAs at each server, substantial cost reductions are achieved. At the same time, storage bandwidth can be scaled at the switch instead of adding more cards to each server. "We're pleased to be selected by an industry leader like TACC," said Stu Aaron, vice president of marketing and business development at Topspin. "Our switched computing solutions are expressly designed to address the needs for reducing the cost and complexity associated with scaling high-performance computing clusters. By leveraging the InfiniBand standard, delivering compelling bandwidth and latency performance advantages over legacy interconnects, and virtualizing Ethernet and Fibre Channel I/O, we are providing real value to real customers today." Topspin offers a complete end-to-end clustering interconnect solution comprising its Topspin 90 and Topspin 360 Switched Computing Systems, InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel and InfiniBand-to-Ethernet gateways, host channel adapters, and comprehensive software suite.