BIOLOGY

Voltaire today announced that its InfiniBand-based grid interconnect solutions are part of an HP supercomputer selected by the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), a constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research based in New Delhi, India, to advance its life sciences computational biology research. IGIB's supercomputer will be used to conduct scientific research ranging from genes to proteins and from biotechnology to pharmaceuticals and personalized medicine. The new HP Cluster Platform 288-node supercomputer leverages the Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288 port multi-service switch for the high bandwidth, low latency cluster interconnect. Voltaire switches offer integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fibre Channel connectivity and are deployed successfully in the world's largest production supercomputer and many other large grids. "HP's Cluster Platform coupled with the Voltaire ISR 9288 InfiniBand switch provides a high performance, scalable architecture that allows us to complete large, complex simulation experiments more quickly than ever before," said Dr. Samir Brahmachari, director, IGIB. "This technology helps IGIB speed access to information, knowledge and new levels of efficiency, which we hope will ultimately culminate in the discovery of new drug targets and predictive medicine for complex disorders with minimum side effects." The supercomputer, which is expected to deliver four teraflops of performance, is a 288-node HP Cluster Platform 3000 based on HP ProLiant servers with Intel Xeon processors and running Linux with XC System Software. The Voltaire ISR 9288 provides the high-speed InfiniBand 10 Gbps cluster interconnect and HP's XC System Software provides cluster management capability. "IGIB needed extremely fast I/O performance for parallel processing and a scalable architecture to increase productivity and accelerate scientific discovery," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. "Voltaire's high port count switches are an integral component of HP's Cluster Platform because they deliver impressive performance and scalability to our customers, yet are based on industry-standard technology that drives greater cost savings." "This demonstrates how research institutions and enterprises can leverage Voltaire technology to build extremely scalable, high performance grids that are more affordable than traditional supercomputing environments," said Mark Favreau, executive vice president and general manager, Voltaire. "We look forward to continuing to work with HP to deliver high performance grids and clusters that address customers' computing challenges."