ENGINEERING

Mellanox Technologies FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand is now deployed in the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Stampede is the most powerful supercomputing system in the National Science Foundation Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), and one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world. TACC introduced Stampede to the public on March 27.

Stampede integrates thousands of individual Dell servers with Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand SwitchX based switches and ConnectX-3 adapter cards with PCI Express 3.0 to drive performance of nearly 10 petaflops.

“The InfiniBand network was easy to deploy and delivers incredible application performance on a consistent basis,” said Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems, TACC. “Utilizing Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand provides us with extremely scalable, high performance — a critical element as Stampede is designed to support hundreds of computationally- and data-intensive science applications from around the United States and the world.”

“Stampede is one of the highest profile supercomputers being deployed in 2013,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand is differentiated by the low latency and accelerated speed which enables the fastest data delivery. With a system the size of Stampede, where scalability is of the greatest of importance, the role of InfiniBand is significant.”

Stampede supports national scientific research into weather forecasting, climate modeling, drug discovery and energy exploration and production.