ACADEMIA

Mellanox Technologies has announced that its FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand solutions will provide the high-performance interconnect enabling extremely scalable parallel applications for the new Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Stampede supercomputer.

With a peak performance of more than 10 petaflops, Stampede will be the most powerful system available to researchers via the NSF's eXtreme Science & Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program when installed in January 2013. Stampede will support the nation's scientists in addressing the most challenging scientific and engineering problems.

Stampede will be integrated by Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand SwitchX SX6000 series switches and ConnectX-3 adapter cards for maximum performance, scalability and efficiency. Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand technology coupled with PCI Express 3.0 plays a crucial role in enabling Stampede to successfully scale over several thousand Dell servers. Stampede will be available to the national open science community for computational science and engineering research advancing breakthroughs in challenging arenas including weather forecasting, climate modeling, drug discovery and energy exploration and production.

“Taking advantage of the performance offered by Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solutions, Stampede will be one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world,” said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. “This technology will enable very tight integration between thousands of Dell high performance compute nodes and also visualization nodes, large shared memory servers, and I/O servers. This integration means researchers can use Stampede for all of the computational needs of their research, including simulation, visualization, large-scale analytics and data mining, and high throughput data processing. We expect the Stampede system to be a uniquely comprehensive, highly scalable system for supporting both simulation-based science and data-driven science.”

“The additional computing power Stampede will bring to the scientific community will drive significant discoveries, from weather modeling and forecasting to energy and environmental research,” said John Mullen, Dell vice president and general manager of global Major Public Accounts. “We’re pleased to work with the Texas Advanced Computing Center toward our collective goal of building one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.”

“We applaud TACC’s initiative to build the Stampede supercomputer to drive the next era of scientific research. Stampede is poised to become a cornerstone of advanced methods for petascale computing and Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand technology is the driving force behind it,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president, and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Utilizing the performance, scalability and efficiency benefits of Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solutions with PCE Express 3.0 support, the Stampede cluster will provide researchers with unprecedented computation capabilities for their most demanding workloads and simulations.”