APPLICATIONS

Bristol, UK, -- Providing a step closer to the realization of supercomputing via the deployment of Linux, Quadrics announces its involvement in the fastest Linux based cluster system to date. The system, called MCR, will be housed at the Department of Energy National Laboratory at Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) in California and will ultimately provide close on 11 Tflop/s compute capacity, comprising of many thousands of processors connected by the largest Quadrics network yet. The performance of the system is anticipated to reach the top 5 of the supercomputers installed today http://www.top500.org/. Quadrics has been working closely with USDOE National Laboratories and the international research community over the past 2 years in establishing Quadrics technologies within a Linux framework. This collaboration provides in part the necessary infrastructure to accommodate production level supercomputing. The system at LLNL is built from off-the-shelf Intel® Xeon® processors and is provided by Linux NetworX, Inc. - for more information see http://www.lnxi.com/news/llnl_info.php and http://www.llnl.gov/linux/mcr/. The Quadrics network consists of a customized fat-tree network that can accommodate up to 1,536 nodes. The system will run the LLNL CHAOS Linux distribution - see http://www.llnl.gov/linux/chaos/. To complement the QsNet high performance network, Quadrics software components are to be provided in 2 separate releases; an open source component that provides full access to all the QsNet hardware and secondly the Quadrics Resource Management System that provides higher-level management and scheduling of parallel programs - further details on this can be found at quadrics.com/support.htm. Together with the Quadrics components support is provided for TotalView from Etnus, Vampir and Vampirtrace from Pallas, as well as optimized support for the Lustre coherent file-system from CFS Inc – see http://www.lustre.org and the MPICH MPI distribution from Argonne National Laboratory. "The type of Science and Engineering calculations required by Livermore's national security mission require a cluster of this size and a very high bandwidth and low-latency interconnect that provides demonstrable and scaleable performance," said Dr. Mark Seager, LLNL's Asst. Dept. Head for TeraScale Systems. "The 11.2 teraFLOP/s system will significantly expand the computing resources available to Livermore's unclassified researchers." Quadrics QsNet is now supported on a range of microprocessor platforms under Linux consisting of Intel® Xeon® and Itanium2®, HP Alpha® and AMD Athlon® together with Quadrics' customized implementations with HP Tru64® Unix for the HP AlphaServer® SC. QsNet performance, for the MCR type nodes ranges from 1.8 us latency to over 320 Mbytes/sec bandwidth. QsNet has previously demonstrated its performance leadership in these systems in support of a whole range of application environments. Combining multiple QsNet host adaptors, Quadrics can also provide even more bandwidth if needed. The commitment to Linux and the road-map of future Quadrics technologies, as outlined by the above, is now of critical importance as commodity off-the-shelf components become more and more accessible and their rate of change increases, creating the need to react quickly to state-of-the-art and user demands. MCR will demonstrate the capability of QsNet and RMS to provide the necessary scale commensurate with the size of systems that can be deployed with these commodity components. The Quadrics next generation network, QsNetII, based on PCI-X and available in 2003, will maintain Quadrics’ technology leadership in high-performance interconnect in this arena. "The MCR system at LLNL reinforces our commitment to driving our technologies in support of computing at the very high end, while recognizing the need for open source so as to empower users in meeting their continuing requirements”, said Drazen Stilinovic, General Manager of Quadrics. “This system creates a unique milestone in the pursuit of more cost-effective deployment of computing systems and will ultimately lead to Quadrics future technologies being deployed in Linux environments of even larger scale. Quadrics is willing and eager to pursue the relationships needed to deliver tera-scale computing.”