ACADEMIA

Mellanox Technologies has announced Connect-IB, the world’s leading scalable server and storage adapter solution for High-Performance Computing (HPC), Web 2.0, Cloud, Big Data, financial services, virtualized data centers and storage environments. Connect-IB adapters deliver the highest throughput of 100Gb/s utilizing PCI Express 3.0 x16, unmatched scaling with innovative transport services, sub-microsecond latency and 130 million messages per second – 4X higher message rate over competing solutions.

Connect-IB is the new foundation for scalable computing. HPC, Web 2.0, and cloud environments are challenging today’s interconnect technologies with their demand for infrastructures, utilizing tens-of-thousands of servers, and hundreds of virtual machines per server. New applications such as Big Data analytics and in-memory computing depend on parallel execution and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). RDMA has also become critical for storage solutions. The new Connect-IB interconnect architecture delivers the performance and capabilities required by compute and storage intensive applications and enables IT managers to build the most efficient, extreme scale data centers.

“In the high-performance computing server and storage markets, the explosion of data volumes is significantly increasing the demand for network throughput,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for HPC. “The introduction of interconnect technology at 100Gb/s is an important step towards meeting these demands. With the rollout of powerful next-generation compute servers including Intel's Romley, we expect growing demand from a variety of HPC markets for highly scalable, high bandwidth, low latency interconnect solutions such as those being offered by Mellanox.”

“Mellanox is the first company to deliver 100Gb/s interconnect throughput – a significant breakthrough to take our customers to the next level of scalable computing,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Connect-IB delivers the industry’s highest performing server and storage interconnect with maximum bandwidth, low latency and highest application efficiency.”

The Connect-IB product line consists of single and dual port adapters for PCI Express 3.0 with options for x8 and x16 host bus interfaces as well as a single port adapter for PCI Express 2.0 x16. Each port supports FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand with MPI ping latency less than 1us. All Mellanox HCAs support CPU offload of transport operations and RDMA for efficient computing. New in Connect-IB is Dynamic Transport operation support for unlimited scalability and end-to-end data protection for unmatched data reliability. Adapter cards are sampling today.