Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, today announced that Japan’s Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has selected Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based Grid Backbone switching solutions as the high-performance interconnect for a powerful Sun Microsystems supercomputer that will be used for computational scientific research. Tokyo Tech’s supercomputer initially will deliver over 85 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops) surpassing Japan’s Earth Simulator, currently the largest supercomputer in Japan at 40 TFlops. This is planned to be extended to more than 100 TFlops at the time of operation in Q1 2006. The Tokyo Tech system is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by the Top500. The Tokyo Tech system will be used by a wide range of researchers across the university and collaborators across Japan and around the globe. With more than 100 TFlops of compute power, the researchers will be able to tackle some of the world's most computationally difficult problems ranging from analyzing the complex molecular structure of proteins, simulated blood flow diagnosis in human brains, and clarification of the generation mechanism of Earth and planetary magnetic fields to nanoscience simulation of carbon nanotubes. “We expect to achieve leading-edge performance and scalability for this clustered supercomputer with the combination of multi-processor Sun Galaxy platforms and Voltaire’s multi-service Grid Backbone switches that offer proven InfiniBand performance,” said Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, Global Scientific Information and Computing (GSIC) Center, Tokyo Tech. “This supercomputer will enable us to take on larger and more complex computing problems that will advance scientific research in areas ranging from engineering to weather to medicine.” The Tokyo Tech system will be built out of next generation Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers using over 10,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and ClearSpeed CSX600 SIMD processors, connected by multiple Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 switches. Voltaire multi-service switches feature integrated InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity to provide the system with high bandwidth and low latency, as well as connectivity to external networks. The Voltaire switches also deliver high-performance connectivity to more than 1 Petabyte of Sun and NEC storage. Half of the system’s storage nodes will be connected with 4X InfiniBand links creating a high performance native InfiniBand storage network. Integration services will be provided by NEC, which is the prime contractor for the system. “The Tokyo Tech supercomputer underscores the clear value and benefits of InfiniBand for clustered applications that require high bandwidth, low latency and the utmost scalability,” said Marc Hamilton, Director of Technology for Sun Microsystems. “Voltaire’s high port density switches with multi-service capabilities are an important part of Sun’s cluster offering because they provide extraordinary performance and scalability for large HPC environments.” “The Tokyo Tech supercomputer is another example of how Voltaire’s director-class multi-service switches are a critical building block for grids and large clusters that are required to scale out and connect to storage and legacy networks,” said Amir Prescher, vice president of business development, Voltaire. “We are pleased to be working with Sun to deliver a system to Tokyo Tech that will contribute to important research and scientific discoveries.” The Tokyo Tech system will be delivered and begin initial operations during Q1 2006.