APPLICATIONS

SPECIAL COVERAGE FROM ISC2006 Mellanox Technologies today announced that it is working with Novell to add innovative real-time deterministic computing capabilities to clusters of server and storage nodes built using InfiniBand solutions. Clustered computing applications are growing at a phenomenal rate, accounting for 45% of high performance technical computing (HPTC) servers in 2005, and are predicted to cover 70-80% of the $14 billion HPTC server market in 2010, per a recent IDC report. The number of higher performing applications being deployed over clusters is growing resulting in ever-increasing demands for deterministic performance through reliable quality of service (QoS) and hard real-time operating system and I/O performance. Novell's real-time solution, Concurrent Real-Time Extensions Powered by SUSE Linux, expands the realm of deterministic computing from single or distributed server configurations to clustered applications comprised of computing and storage nodes. When combined with Mellanox InfiniBand technology, the loss-less nature of the InfiniBand fabric and the end-to-end quality of service delivery mechanisms available via its I/O channels architecture make it a perfect fit for latency and timing sensitive applications. "Concurrent Real-Time Extensions on SUSE Linux enables compute intensive parallel applications, and bandwidth intensive storage applications used in clusters to perform within strict latency and timing tolerance levels," said Moiz Kohari, director of real-time solutions at Novell. "Financial trading and analytics based large volumes of market data, where the speed and timing guarantee of order execution is of paramount importance, are examples of applications that can benefit from a real-time solution from Novell and Mellanox." "InfiniBand I/O possesses no-compromise hard real time I/O services characteristics based on field-proven, hardware-based reliable transport that perfectly complement real time operating systems that are bound by the same characteristics for the services that they provide," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox. "This is unlike TCP based I/O services where dropping of packets and software based end-to-end services implementation result in unpredictable I/O services." Novell and Mellanox are driving development of standards-based QoS extensions to the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) software available from the OpenFabrics Alliance (www.openfabrics.org). This will showcase the benefits of QoS-enabled InfiniBand fabrics with Concurrent Real-Time Solutions on SUSE Linux in providing determinism in latency and timing to clustered applications. "Real-time kernel and InfiniBand quality of service features can provide a more predictable network and operating system environment for high performance computing applications," says Matt Leininger, Computational Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. "These features will be influential in addressing the scalability requirements of our science and engineering workloads running on Linux clusters." In the financial applications world, the task of minimizing round trip data latency has grown increasingly difficult and costly given the doubling of market data volumes each year. And the race to find trading opportunities not yet picked over by commodity algorithms has further amplified demand for speed and processing capacity. "Market activity growth and the pursuit of arbitrage opportunities in more complex correlations have combined to create an intense demand for large scale, lightening fast automated trading platforms," said Ken Barnes, VP of Business & Planning at Wombat Financial Software. "This is redefining the notion of what Wombat customers consider real-time, and the work we are seeing out of Novell and Mellanox is a very encouraging sign that clustered computing systems are evolving to meet those needs." Visit the Mellanox Booth at the International Supercomputing Conference (June 27-30, 2006, Dresden, Germany) Novell and Mellanox will hold a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session on "Real-time determinism in InfiniBand clustered applications." The BOF will be held at Conference Room # 5 from 10:00 AM-11:00 AM on Thursday, June 29th.