INDUSTRY

King of Prussia, PA – InfiniCon Systems, the premier provider of shared I/O and switching solutions for next-generation server networks, announced today that it has been selected by Fujitsu to provide an InfiniBand-based clustering fabric for the world’s fastest Linux-based supercomputer. The Fujitsu cluster will be deployed by Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) to accelerate biotechnology research. It will feature Fujitsu’s newly developed Linux based PRIMERGY servers containing 2,048 Intel Xeon processors and deliver a peak performance of 12.4 trillion FLOPs (floating point operations per second), vaulting it to the third position in the Top 500 rankings of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. "The power of InfiniBand has always been apparent in its design, but the issue has been when companies such as InfiniCon would bring this technology to the maturity level required for large-scale deployment," stated Vernon Turner, Group Vice President of Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC. "This implementation by a tier-one server vendor, with strong HPC expertise, clearly signals the readiness of these solutions." InfiniCon’s InfinIO 3000 Switch Series will be used to interconnect the Fujitsu computing cluster, providing a non-blocking, 10Gbps full bisectional bandwidth fabric (FBB) that will support 512 multi-processor nodes – the largest of any InfiniBand cluster to be deployed to date. Supercomputers the scope of the Fujitsu cluster were once the realm of mainframe and proprietary technologies, but advances in commodity computing and the bandwidth advantages of the low-latency InfiniBand architecture have created a new, highly-efficient model for designing standards-based high performance computing (HPC) clusters. The combination of Fujitsu’s leading PRIMERGY family of servers and InfiniBand-based switch technology from InfiniCon creates unprecedented levels of performance, reliability, and availability for a ‘scale out’ cluster solution. The Foundation for Next-Generation Computing The InfinIO 3000 Switch Series packs thirty-two 10Gbps InfiniBand ports into 1U of rack space, making it the most powerful and dense switching solution in the industry. Its design has been optimized to deliver top performance as HPC and database clusters scale – reducing end-to-end fabric latency by approximately 600% over competitive technology offerings. In addition, the 3000 Series features Ports On Demand‘ technology, allowing ports to be added to the fabric non-disruptively to allow seamless growth. InfiniCon provides a complete spectrum of switching and I/O systems to enable users to design 10Gbps InfiniBand fabrics that can scale without performance penalty and connect clusters seamlessly to existing storage and communications networks. "Our partnership with Fujitsu on the RIKEN project validates InfiniCon’s standing as a top systems provider, and confirms InfiniBand’s capabilities and readiness to serve as the networking technology that enables the shift to grid, fabric, and cluster models of computing," stated InfiniCon CEO Charles Foley.