QLogic announced that its 12000 Series switches and 7300 Series adapters have helped propel a cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to the number 15 position on the recently-announced list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

The cluster, known as "Zin," is the largest in the world powered by the future Intel Xeon processor E5 family. The Zin cluster of 46,208 cores and 2916 nodes was delivered in two phases with the last phase of nearly 1500 nodes arriving at Lawrence Livermore on October 27. The final installation was completed in a just a few days, allowing Lawrence Livermore time to submit Zin's performance to the TOP500. Zin is also one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers on the TOP500 list, and one of the highest-performing "pure" Intel Xeon Processor-based systems, producing up to 837 megaflops per watt.

LLNL, a National Nuclear Security Administration R&D laboratory, applies some of the world's most powerful supercomputers to maintaining the nation's aging nuclear deterrent without testing, as well as addressing such challenges as grid and network management, energy research and climate change.

"The ever more powerful computing systems Lawrence Livermore requires to fulfill its national security missions must be balanced with increasing energy efficiency," said Matt Leininger of LLNL's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. "To meet its scientific computing demands, the Laboratory works with industry leaders to advance HPC."

"The Zin cluster represents a significant breakthrough in achieving LLNL's missions by delivering efficient performance on a wide range of essential workloads," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager, Intel Technical Computing Group. "By delivering over twice the peak double precision floating point performance as previous generations at the same power levels, the future Xeon Processor E5 family contributes significantly to delivering that performance."

"Not only is Zin the highest performing future Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based cluster, but it is the very model of energy efficiency as one of the industry's top-performing 'pure' x86-based HPC clusters. Setup was incredibly swift, due in large part to QLogic's TrueScale InfiniBand architecture and maturity," said Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager, network solutions group, QLogic. "Our TrueScale architecture is the only InfiniBand offering on the market that is designed from the ground up and specifically optimized for demanding, large-scale HPC environments like those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."