Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, today announced the delivery of the first InfiniBand driver software stack for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for the Intel® Itanium® 2-based Computing Platform. The software will expedite the deployment of high-performance computing clusters that can now take advantage of the performance potential of the Itanium architecture, the scaling and clustering capabilities of InfiniBand, and the power of Microsoft Windows. Topspin’s new software rounds out what is already the most complete InfiniBand software stack in the industry, including 32-bit and 64-bit support for both Linux and Windows. The solution will be demonstrated in the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) booth (#637) at Intel Developer Forum this week at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif. Topspin is providing Cornell with the InfiniBand host software for Windows Server 2003 on the Itanium 2-based system, as well as the underlying InfiniBand infrastructure—including switches, host channel adapters, and management. "CTC’s demonstration will show that the Infiniband driver software stack gives the necessary low latency and high bandwidth to feed computationally-intensive applications on the Itanium platform," said David Lifka, chief technical officer, Cornell Theory Center. "Intel and Topspin have worked very hard with us to make this technology available for the Windows platform." "Microsoft is very engaged in the high-performance computing arena," said Greg Rankich, high-performance computing manager for Microsoft. "As our HPC solution stack continues to grow and evolve, we are delighted to have partners like Topspin pursuing and building new technologies on the Windows Server 2003 platform." "Itanium 2 processors and InfiniBand architecture are a potent combination for HPC implementations," said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group. "InfiniBand showcases the true performance potential of the Itanium 2 architecture, and we’re excited to be working with Cornell and Topspin to offer this capability in a Windows environment." "We are pleased to be the first to enable the marriage of InfiniBand, Itanium 2-based systems, and Windows Server 2003 for the high performance computing environment," said Patrick Conte, vice president of sales at Topspin. "By listening to customers like Cornell, we are able to stay in front of key trends like this one." InfiniBand is the only industry-standard, high-performance interconnect technology available today that provides an unmatched combination of 10Gbps high throughput, extremely low latency (less than 7 microseconds), and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). This combination is critical for building high-performance computing clusters capable of delivering the performance of traditional supercomputers at a fraction of the cost. Topspin offers a complete end-to-end clustering interconnect solution, including the Topspin 90 and Topspin 360 Switched Computing Systems, InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand-to-Ethernet gateways, host channel adapters, and a comprehensive software suite.