Violin Memory, System Fabric Works demonstrate fabric attached memory

Technology alliance enables terabyte scale memory solutions for HPC applications: Violin Memory, Inc. and System Fabric Works announced a product and technology alliance which combines Scalable Memory and OpenFabrics technology. The combined technologies enable a set of Fabric Attached Memory solutions. The first of these solutions will be demonstrated at SC07. Fabric Attached Memory provides High Performance Computing (HPC) environments with a uniquely scalable and low latency approach to sharing data within a cluster. Violin’s memory can scale to over 8 TByte of DRAM in a single rack and the OpenFabrics software (InfiniBand or 10 Gb Ethernet) supports bandwidths greater than 1 GByte/s per server with random access patterns. Applications that are seek-bound or latency sensitive will greatly benefit from Fabric Attached Memory. “Violin Switched Memory enables low latency memory systems to scale with dataset requirements,” said Bob Pearson, CEO of System Fabric Works. “By providing both Fabric Attached Memory and Storage, we enable application and system architects to use a full suite of tools for maximum performance and capacity.” “System Fabric Works provides the lowest latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) software for Fabric Attachment,” said Donpaul Stephens, President of Violin Memory. “Fabric Attachment enables sharing and dramatically lowers the effective cost of memory in an HPC environment.” “Mellanox is pleased to support Violin and System Fabric Works in this significant addition to the OpenFabrics enabled Data Center by facilitating leading I/O fabric connectivity with our adapters,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox. “The Fabric Attached Memory solution provides applications the ability to access ever-increasing datasets with minimal latency.” The combined solution will be demonstrated at SC07 in Reno, NV from Nov 12-15, 2007. The Fabric Attached Memory will be connected to the SCinet InfiniBand network during the show. SCinet features a high-performance production-quality network with direct wide area connectivity to many national and worldwide networks and is an OpenFabrics Network with RDMA enablement. Violin Memory and System Fabric Works can be found at Booth #158 at SC07. Both companies are members and supporters of the OpenFabrics Alliance.