Mellanox Delivers New Levels of Performance for Windows HPC Server 2008 Clusters

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, announced the immediate availability of NetworkDirect drivers for Windows HPC Server 2008 that take full advantage of InfiniBand’s native Remote Direct Memory Access capabilities for optimal cluster performance. Together with Mellanox’s InfiniBand adapters, this solution provide higher productivity, scalability and performance for mainstream enterprise and high-performance clustered applications used by researchers, scientists, analysts and engineers. Latency sensitive applications, such as computational fluid dynamics, financial services, weather simulations and others will immediately benefit from Microsoft NetworkDirect and native InfiniBand capabilities. Windows HPC Server 2008 and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect adapters fuel the fast growing HPC cluster market. According to IDC’s World wide High-Performance and Technical Computing Server Forecast released in April 2007, IDC expects the total high-performance computing market to expand by 9.1% annually in revenue to reach $15.5 billion by 2011, with cluster unit shipments expanding by 12.5% annually to a total of 425,712 cluster units by 2011. “Microsoft is pleased to be working with Mellanox Technologies to ensure that Windows HPC Server 2008 solutions with high-speed InfiniBand interconnect adapters deliver an outstanding level of performance, scalability and efficiency,” said Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft. “Our new networking architecture takes advantage of the advanced InfiniBand capabilities to provide lowest latency and higher throughput for performance-sensitive applications.” “The combination of Microsoft NetworkDirect design and Mellanox’s leading InfiniBand adapters deliver outstanding computing performance that addresses the productivity and scalability needs of current and future computing platforms,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “We have been working closely with Microsoft, and the outcome is a high-performance platform that is best of breed and easy to deploy.” The InfiniBand drivers for Windows HPC Server 2008, based on OpenFabrics.org open source community development, are available now in Beta at Mellanox's website at www.mellanox.com and the OpenFabrics driver repository website at www.openfabrics.org. The drivers are expected to be generally available in production quality to coincide with the general availability version of Windows HPC Server 2008.