GOVERNMENT

Leading adapter scales 20Gb/s clustered blade computing performance with ultra low latency: Mellanox Technologies announced that the company’s 20Gb/s ConnectX IB-based InfiniBand adapter cards are available with the IBM BladeCenter H, providing optimized multi-core server cluster performance in power and space-saving blade chassis environments. Mellanox’s ConnectX IB InfiniBand HCA and IBM’s BladeCenter H provides one of the leading clustered computing platforms that will service the total blade server market which is estimated to grow to over 1 million units this year and estimated to grow by more than three-fold to over 3 million units in 2010. “ConnectX IB InfiniBand adapters deliver unparalleled 20Gb/s I/O connectivity for high-throughput and latency-sensitive clusters, grids and virtualized environments,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “IBM BladeCenter H is an optimized platform for business-critical applications and our InfiniBand adapters further enhance power efficiency through I/O consolidation, and enables applications to achieve the most performance out of multi-core CPUs.” “High-performance computing clusters can range from as few as two to thousands of servers woven together to deliver the performance demanded by a broad range of applications including those in commercial and enterprise markets such as computer-aided engineering (CAE), financial services and life sciences – all can take advantage of high-performance cluster computing,” said Alex Yost, VP and Business Line Executive, BladeCenter. “By integrating Mellanox ConnectX IB InfiniBand adapters, IBM’s BladeCenter H can provide unprecedented levels of performance for a multitude of high-performance computing environments and applications.” A Mellanox ConnectX IB 20Gb/s InfiniBand adapter card can reside on each server blade in the BladeCenter H enclosure to provide high-performance connectivity to the processor through a PCI Express interface. InfiniBand signals are carried over the midplane to an InfiniBand pass-thru module that plugs into a high speed I/O module bay. This provides 100% non-blocking 20Gb/s blade server connections to an external InfiniBand switch – unmatched in the industry. Each ConnectX IB mezzanine card adapter supports two ports and can connect to two independent pass-thru modules for redundancy and higher aggregated bandwidth – capabilities inherent to InfiniBand that are used for mission-critical applications and the most-demanding HPC deployments. The ConnectX IB-based adapter cards will be available from IBM and IBM business partners in October 2007. These cards have been tested with OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution version 1.2.5. and also support OFED-based device drivers from Cisco and Voltaire. These drivers are available on the OpenFabrics.org, and Cisco and Voltaire web sites respectively.