INDUSTRY

Voltaire, a leading provider of high performance InfiniBand solutions, introduced today the industry's highest port density, most scalable InfiniBand switch for large scale server clusters and grids. The Voltaire ISR 9288 features 288 ports of 10 Gbps full bisectional bandwidth in a single chassis enabling HPC customers to build very large clusters with fewer switching components, simplifying clusters and reducing total cost of ownership. The solution makes the construction of clusters of thousands of nodes three times more efficient than current InfiniBand offerings. Voltaire designed the ISR 9288 based on direct input from Voltaire's prestigious customers including the U.S. Department of Energy and supercomputing centers at Mississippi State University and Ohio Supercomputer Center. These customers represent a few of the growing number of institutions that leverage Voltaire's InfiniBand switching solutions to power general purpose, computational and visualization clusters. "Our customers have been extremely responsive to Voltaire's solution for building clusters of tens to thousands of servers using only one or a few, highly scalable InfiniBand switches," said Shahin Khan, Vice President of High Performance and Technical Computing, SUN, which has been working with Voltaire to deliver InfiniBand clustering solutions to HPC and grid data center customers. "With the ISR 9288, Voltaire is taking its customer-proven solution to new heights offering even greater performance, scalability and manageability for InfiniBand clusters." With this new industry-leading InfiniBand solution, Voltaire, a partner of IBM, Oracle, Hitachi, SUN, SGI, and Apple, is addressing key needs of high performance computing applications and enterprise data centers. In addition to scalable switching, the Voltaire ISR 9288 features multi-protocol connectivity in a single, flexible system. The switch chassis hosts Voltaire's router blades that provide seamless connectivity between server clusters, fibre channel SANs, NAS appliances, IP SANs and TCP/IP networks (LANs). The Voltaire ISR 9288 also provides comprehensive management and diagnostics capabilities, including provisioning, performance management and fast fabric initiation, through the VoltaireVision(TM) InfiniBand Fabric Management Software that is embedded in the switch. "InfiniBand continues to prove itself as the high speed interconnect of choice for high performance computing clusters," said Matt Leininger, principle member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, a customer of Voltaire. "An extremely scalable InfiniBand switch is a key building block towards scalable high performance clusters of thousands of nodes." "Larger port-count switches simplify design, scaling and management issues in architecting high performance computing clusters for our users," said Bill Boas, InfiniBand project leader, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "With 288 ports in a single InfiniBand switch, we can foresee an important enabling step along the path toward a PetaFlop level machine." "We are very pleased by the broad acceptance and adoption of our InfiniBand solutions by supercomputing centers, national laboratories and systems vendors around the world," said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire. "The ISR 9288 is another example of Voltaire's leadership and focus on delivering solutions that customers are asking for to improve the performance of their most critical applications." The Voltaire ISR 9288 will be available in early Q3 2004.