ENGINEERING

Mellanox Technologies 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity products, including ConnectX-2 adapters with FlexBoot technology, IS5025 and IS5600 switches with FabricIT fabric management software, and active copper cables, provide the high-performance server and storage networking for the new University of Colorado at Boulder Dell-based 1,368-node cluster. The new cluster ranks #31 on the June 2010 TOP500 list of supercomputers with peak performance of 152Tflops and an efficiency rating of 86 percent.

Scientist and researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Colorado at Denver and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will work together on research topics in biotech life sciences and earth sciences such as atmospheric chemistry, climate, cloud physics and storms, weather hazards to aviation, and interactions between the sun and Earth. Scientists are looking closely in all of these areas at the role of humans in both creating climate change and responding to severe weather occurrences – all of which require highly-efficient, high-performance computing resources.

“Through the University of Colorado at Boulder, scientists are gaining access to high-performance computational facilities to improve human understanding of life science and Earth system processes,” said Marc Sultzbaugh, vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox Technologies. “By incorporating Mellanox end-to-end 40Gb/s networking, the University of Colorado at Boulder provides scientists with faster and more detailed climate modeling, as well as the means for emergency response teams to quickly react to dangerous weather phenomena.”

“Our mission is to develop technologies that break down barriers for scientists working to solve some of society’s biggest challenges,” said John Mullen, Dell vice president and general manager for Higher Education. “Joined by Mellanox, we’re proud to be doing just that – making high-performance computing more efficient for Dr. Tufo and his team at the University of Colorado.”

“Industry leaders are turning to scientists for help in predicting how climate might affect their business or community in the coming decades,” said Henry Tufo, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computational Science Center Director at The University of Colorado at Boulder and Section Head of the Computer Science Section in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at NCAR. “The University of Colorado at Boulder’s latest Dell supercomputer with high-performance Mellanox InfiniBand connectivity provides researchers and scientists with a highly efficient and scalable high-performance server and storage cluster with zero compromise. The new systems will help us to achieve high-resolution climate modeling and to improve accuracy in depicting regional atmospheric disturbances, and the opportunity to make accelerated progress on the world’s most important scientific problems.”

Mellanox’s end-to-end InfiniBand connectivity, consisting of the ConnectX-2 line of I/O adapter products, cables and comprehensive IS5000 family of fixed and modular switches, deliver industry-leading performance, efficiency and economics for the best return-on-investment for performance interconnects. Mellanox provides its worldwide customers with the broadest, most advanced and highest performing end-to-end networking solutions for the world’s most compute-demanding applications.