ENGINEERING

Voltaire today announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) will use Voltaire's InfiniBand-based grid backbone switching solutions as part of a powerful HP clustered supercomputer for advanced weapons system design research. The system will be installed this month at the Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The DoD's 10 teraflop supercomputer will be used to conduct research on advanced weapons concepts, improve and speed up modification programs, enhance simulation programs and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. Multiple Voltaire Grid Director(tm) ISR 9288 switches are used in the 1024-node HP Cluster Platform supercomputer for the high bandwidth, low latency cluster interconnect. Voltaire multi-service switches offer integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fibre Channel connectivity and are deployed successfully in some of the world's largest supercomputers and data grids. "We anticipate tremendous performance from this large cluster through the installation of HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio with Voltaire's 288-port InfiniBand switches," said Steve Wourms, ASC MSRC Director. "By using these industry standard-based solutions, we're able to reduce costs while providing a robust, sustainable high performance computing system to run critical Department of Defense applications." Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 switches provide the high-speed interconnect and HP's XC System Software provides cluster management capability. The supercomputer is a 1024-node Cluster Platform 4000 based on HP ProLiant DL145 servers with AMD Opteron processors running the Linux operating system. "The supercomputer at the DoD underscores the fact that our high port count InfiniBand switches are a key enabler for building large clusters and grids that are greater than one thousand nodes," said Mark Favreau, executive vice president and general manager, Voltaire. "We are extremely pleased to have our solutions selected by HP and the U.S. Department of Defense for mission-critical research and defense initiatives." "This customer deployment is yet another proof point that cluster technologies with InfiniBand interconnect truly deliver against the demands of supercomputing in real world, mission-critical environments," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. "Voltaire's 288 port switch is a critical component of the HP Cluster Platform because it provides exceptional performance and manageability for large, scale out compute environments." The HP supercomputer with Voltaire Grid Backbone solutions was chosen by the Department of Defense High Performance Office, as part of its Technology Insertion for 2005 (TI-05) program, based on the completeness and robustness of the solution and price/performance.