INTERCONNECTS

InfiniCon Systems, the premier provider of shared I/O and switching solutions for next-generation server networks, announced today it has been selected as an inaugural member of Sun Microsystems’ High Performance and Technical Computing (HPTC) Alliance Partner Program. InfiniCon’s industry-leading InfinIO interconnect technology – based on the InfiniBand Architecture – provides up to a 30Gbps infrastructure for building computing fabrics and creates a powerful complement to Sun’s leading server and grid solution offerings for the HPTC market. HPTC customers have already benefited from the impressive performance gains attainable when powerful technologies from Sun and InfiniCon are leveraged. Pennsylvania State University has installed a 160-node cluster built with dual processor SunFire V60x servers and a 10Gbs fabric based on InfiniCon’s InfinIO 3000 Switch Series. The Penn State cluster, known as Pleiades, yields 1.3 TeraFlops of processing power, and will be used primarily by the gravitational physics community at the university to facilitate research projects that include detecting gravitational waves as a tool for making astronomical discoveries when studying the universe. Pleiades is positioned to become one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, when the TOP500 list is recalculated in spring 2004. "Sun’s commitment to satisfying the needs of performance-hungry HPTC customers is unwavering," noted Shahin Khan, vice president of the HPTC business unit at Sun. "Through the HPTC Alliance Partner Program and relationships with technology leaders like InfiniCon, we are assuring access to a suite of solutions that can support scientific and exploratory computing projects of ever increasing scale." InfiniCon has enjoyed significant traction in the high-performance computing space. The high bandwidth and low latency attributes of its InfiniBand-based systems are ideally suited for building powerful clusters from industry-standard servers – at price points far below the cost of single-machine supercomputers. RIKEN, a research institution in Japan, is deploying InfiniCon’s InfinIO technology for a 512-node cluster expected to yield more than 12 TeraFlops of processing power. Texas A&M University recently selected InfinIO for a 36-node, Opteron-based cluster. InfiniCon offers a completely integrated solution for designing InfiniBand fabrics – from the adapters, software, and middleware required for the host environment, to the award-winning multi-protocol switching fabric solutions that allow InfiniBand clusters seamless access to fibre channel and Ethernet resources.