INDUSTRY

InfiniCon Systems, the premier provider of I/O virtualization and clustering solutions for next-generation server networks, announced today that National Tsinghua University of the People's Republic of China has selected InfiniCon to supply a 10Gbps switch fabric for a 128-node, InfiniBand-based cluster. Tsinghua University will deploy the high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support a myriad of research projects conducted in both basic and applied sciences. Shanghai Hong Ri International - an InfiniCon ASAP program channel partner in China - fostered the relationship between InfiniCon and Tsinghua University. InfiniCon's InfinIO(TM) 3000 Switch Series will provide a 10Gbps, full bisectional bandwidth fabric for the 128-node cluster, comprised of Hewlett-Packard's Integrity(R) rx2600 servers with Intel Itanium(R) 2 dual processors. The HPC configuration is expected to yield peak computing performance of more than one trillion floating point calculations per second (TeraFlops). Eleven schools with a total of 44 departments within Tsinghua University will have access to the computational power of the InfiniBand cluster. In addition, the Tsinghua cluster will be among the initial university sites integrated into the China Education and Research Grid, sponsored by the Ministry of Education. One of the most ambitious grid projects by a government to date, the Education and Research Grid was launched in October 2003 and will ultimately link more than 200,000 students and faculty members from nearly 100 universities across China, enabling them to share resources and work collaboratively. "A central mission for Tsinghua is to continually leverage advances in high-speed networking so that we may offer researchers across academia and industry the most powerful computational tools and applications possible," stated Professor Zheng, Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing Technology, Tsinghua University. "The InfiniBand-based switching fabric from InfiniCon and Shanghai Hong Ri equips our university with a high-performance infrastructure that is much more capable of supporting computationally intense education and research projects, and integrates seamlessly into broader, grid-based environments." InfiniBand: The Premier High-Speed Interconnect Breakthrough performance and price advantages are increasingly making InfiniBand the interconnect technology of choice for high-speed networking. Its superior bandwidth (up to 30Gbps), ultra-low switching latency across large fabrics, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities combine to accelerate applications running across high performance computing and enterprise environments. "The high performance computing capacity of the Itanium 2 processor-based servers easily meets the application requirements of Tsinghua University's scientific research projects, while the open architecture enables users of the system to freely choose the most cost-effective grid computing application at each level of the system," said Ian Yang, General Manager of Intel China, one of the core IT companies jointly developing the Education and Research Grid project. "These technologies are becoming key enablers for the evolution to grid computing by allowing significant amounts of flexible computing power to be assigned where and when it is needed most."