Mellanox Expands Its End-User Benchmark Center

Mellanox Cluster Center Addresses the Growing Industry Needs for a State-of-the-Art Benchmarking, Qualification and Development Center: Mellanox Technologies today announced the expansion of the Mellanox Cluster Center with Vulcan, a high-performance compute environment, based on Mellanox’s industry-leading ConnectX interconnect adapters and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. The Mellanox Cluster Center provides customers, partners and independent software vendors with the ability to qualify, benchmark, and optimize high-performance enterprise and storage applications. “The Mellanox Cluster Center provides a unique environment for our partners and end-users to test-drive and optimize their solutions on a world-class compute infrastructure, and in particular for independent software vendors, to maximize their application’s productivity by taking advantage of Mellanox interconnect solutions,” said Gilad Shainer, director of technical marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The Vulcan cluster empowers our center with a technology leading platform utilizing Mellanox’s ConnectX technology and AMD’s quad-core processors.” “Applications today demand guaranteed scalability. ConnectX helps improve end-to-end efficiency and scaling while lowering processing overhead and is a great complement to AMD processor-enabled solutions,” said Scot Schultz, senior strategic alliances manager of high performance computing, AMD. “Together we are offering a technical advantage for our shared end-users who demand superior performance and a high-performance per-watt solution.” The Cluster Center has been operational around the clock since August 2006 and has been utilized by a large number of end-users and commercial vendors. The Vulcan cluster increases the center’s capability and addresses the growing needs for high-performance clusters in commercial high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Vulcan is comprised of 32 Colfax International servers, each containing two Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, for a total of 256 cores, and connectivity to native InfiniBand-based storage systems. Mellanox ConnectX 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and Flextronics’ 24-port 20Gb/s switches in a full Fat-Tree non-blocking network architecture connect the cluster server and storage nodes. Zarlink's ZL60615 ZLynx active optical cables interconnect the servers and switches. Z-Research GlusterFS cluster file system provides an option to utilize native InfiniBand-based storage during various application testing. “Colfax International is proud to continue being a part of the Mellanox Cluster Center,” said Gautam Shah, CEO, Colfax International. “End-users and ISVs will continue to leverage from our world leading compute cluster solutions, in order to qualify and optimize their application.” “Z Research is excited to showcase scalable, reliable and high-performance clustered storage at the Mellanox Cluster Center in Santa Clara,” said Hitesh Chellani, co-founder of Z Research. “This enables potential customers to test their applications and solutions on clustered storage built with Gluster File System, commodity storage servers and Mellanox ConnectX technology.” “Zarlink is delighted to be an integral connectivity solution for the Mellanox Cluster Center,” said Dr. Marco Ghisoni, product line manager for Zarlink's ZLynx Active Optical Cables. “Cost-effective optical cable solutions enable HPCC performance and scalability that is synonymous to InfiniBand architecture. The Vulcan cluster is an excellent vehicle for HPC developers to test drive best-in-class InfiniBand hardware and software ecology.”