AUTOMOTIVE

The Quadrics’ QsNetII PCI-X 64-bit host adaptor operates at the full 133 MHz specification and provides over 850 Mbytes/s sustained MPI bandwidth and close to 1.8 us MPI latency for standard AMD Opteron processor–based architectures. Multiple adaptors can also be used to provide even more MPI bandwidth and/or high availability when required. The QsNetII Quadrics product, builds on the success of the previous generation QsNet product which has been deployed in a large number of the top 10 Supercomputers in the past 3 years. "Quadrics is witnessing a large market pull towards use of the AMD Opteron processor and will continue to develop its software environment to ensure that the full benefits of AMD Opteron processor–based servers can be exploited," said John Taylor, Head of Marketing and Technical Support at Quadrics. "The deployment of very large Linux clusters is increasing as a means to deliver supercomputing performance and reliability at more cost-effective rates. Quadrics continues to work together with industrial leaders to provide customers with best-in-class high performance networking solutions." Since the launch of the AMD Opteron processor, Quadrics has been working closely with AMD to provide full support of its features and benefits. As a SUSE LINUX Technology Partner, Quadrics now provides optimized support for NUMA-based kernels, having tuned QsNetII to the enhancements for NUMA systems incorporated in SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64. In conjunction with AMD Opteron processor suppliers, Quadrics ensures that QsNetII is fully certified for AMD Opteron processor-based servers and their PCI-X subsystems. “The AMD Opteron processor platform can provide outstanding security and investment protection for today’s high-performance computing environments,” said Ben Williams, director, server/workstation business segment, AMD’s Computation Products Group. “This announcement further demonstrates that AMD is meeting customer’s needs with a 32- and 64-bit simplified networking backbone in the AMD Opteron processor.” "SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 provides businesses with a future-proof server operating environment expertly tuned to AMD Opteron processors," said Uwe Heine, Chief Alliance Officer at Novell's SUSE LINUX business unit. "Quadrics' QsNetII host adaptor supporting AMD Opteron helps corporations which run SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server technology on large Linux clusters to further increase efficiency and performance." QsNetII development has up to now focussed on very large switch configurations and deployment of two 1024-way systems. In the next quarter, Quadrics will announce a series of highly competitive switch configurations making QsNetII more cost-effective for medium sized cluster configuration deployment. These will be available initially as an 8-way configuration, specifically designed for technical evaluation of QsNetII, and followed later in the year by 32, 64 and 128-way solutions.