INTERCONNECTS

Silicon Graphics and Voltaire today announced that they will jointly provide SGI® Altix™ server customers with Voltaire InfiniBand solutions, enabling easy creation of high-speed clusters. Voltaire’s InfiniBand product line will be particularly useful to customers seeking to cluster multiple SGI® Altix™ 350 server nodes. The SGI Altix 350 server, which was introduced Jan. 12, is the only fully scalable Linux® mid-range system purpose built specifically for scientists, design engineers, researchers and other technical computing users. The two companies will demonstrate their combined solution at the 2004 LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York City Jan. 20-23. A total of five Altix 350 nodes in two cluster configurations will be interconnected via Voltaire InfiniBand solutions in the SGI Booth 459, and two other servers will be interconnected in the Voltaire Booth 861. The systems will run real-world bioinformatics, chemistry and database applications across multiple nodes. SGI Altix systems are designed to handle the large data sets and throughput challenges common to high-performance applications for manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, earth and environmental sciences research, genomics and homeland security. “Today's technical users have requirements for systems that 'scale up' and ones that 'scale out,’” said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI. “Scaling out in high-performance computing environments requires extremely high I/O rates, which presents particular difficulties to many clustering environments. The powerful combination of SGI's new Altix 350 server and InfiniBand interconnect solutions from Voltaire enables customers to deploy a complete solution for scaling up and scaling out of complex applications and workloads.” “The SGI Altix family answers a powerful desire within the HPC community to embrace open systems without taking a hit in performance,” said Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO, Voltaire. “SGI’s latest Linux server, the mid-range Altix 350, presents an opportunity to reach even more performance-conscious technical users with high-throughput Altix clusters. Today’s announcement means that Voltaire solutions can further broaden the interconnect options available to these important customers.” Voltaire’s InfiniBand solutions balance high-performance hardware with production-ready standards based software stack for HPC clusters. The result is unmatched performance within InfiniBand clusters and in their connectivity with the existing infrastructure.