INDUSTRY

By Allan Torres, Founder, The Torres Group, LLC -- Myricom's Tom Leinberger, a speaker at the 8th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Cluster Computing May 15 in South Lake Tahoe, California, offered conference participants a fascinating look at the Myri10G, the HPC community's first seamless, end-to-end clustering and connectivity solution, in a talk titled "A Technically Superior Interconnect for HPC Clusters." Myricom, an innovator in high-performance cluster interconnects, has been shipping Myri-10G NIC products--a convergence that leverages 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology to the HPC world-- and HPC techniques into the Ethernet world. The new Myri-10G solutions are a full 10-Gigabit Ethernet implementation and more, this is no "one trick pony." Myri-10G's Myrinet extensions open a broader offering of system solutions than Ethernet alone can provide; this flexibility translates into performance gains and lower wall clock times. For standard TCP/IP and UDP/IP 10-Gigabit Ethernet applications, the Myri-10G protocol-offload Network Interface Cards (NIC) deliver excellent performance at minimal cost and are compliant with Ethernet standards. Connect the NIC port to a standard 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch and you’ll experience near-wire-rate TCP/IP and UDP/IP throughput (9.7-9.9 Gbits/s). This latest 10GE NIC offering represents a 7 watts, low-power ASIC. When scaling up to very large systems, heat rejection represents a huge hurdle to overcome, when competing with heat rejection from CPU's, disks and other components in the data center. The broader software support for 10-Gigabit Myrinet and Low-Latency 10-Gigabit Ethernet is MX (Myrinet Express). Connect the NIC to the new 10-Gigabit Myrinet switch or to a low-latency 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch, and MX unleashes the capabilities of a network that supports the same software interfaces as Ethernet, plus low-latency, kernel-bypass communication using MPI and Sockets APIs. Furthermore, 10-Gigabit Myrinet is interoperable with 10-Gigabit Ethernet for connections to IP networks (grids) and storage. Already announced and being delivered this next month, will come a new series of Myri-10G Switches, cut-through switches with source routing, low latency, economical and scalable to thousands of hosts using efficient, layer-2, Myrinet switching. Myricom has clearly demonstrated interoperability with the usual suspects in 10GE Switches and plays well with others. The core of Myricom's latest generation of switches is the 10G XBar32 chip. Myricom is producing and delivering standalone 32-port switches, diameter-3 Clos networks up to 512 ports in a single enclosure. This high density, smaller foot print provides an economical diameter-5 switch networks scaling to 8192 nodes. Cognizant of the need for low-power and low-heat output in the data center their latest “Flagship” switch is a 512-port Clos "Network in a Box," is only 1680 Watts in a maximum configuration. While Myricom may have a different approach to providing 10GE TCP/IP capabilities, this quickly deployed approach comes from a position of knowledge of highly scaleable HPC Systems thought the world and in a great number of the Top 100 Systems in the HPC community. The LCI International Conference is a four-day event that attracts many of the world's top practitioners of cluster computing. It includes a multi-track conference, tutorials and a broad range of presentations and papers delivered by computer professionals in industry, academia and government. Events at the conference address the various ways that organizations are enhancing performance and scalability in clusters, and integrating scientific and engineering applications into cluster architectures. For more information about the conference, go to www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/conferences.