INTERCONNECTS

Voltaire and Advanced Clustering Technologies today announced that the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has selected Voltaire's high performance InfiniBand solutions to support a large computational Linux cluster. Advanced Clustering Technologies, a reseller of Voltaire's complete family of InfiniBand solutions, will deliver a turnkey solution to OSC consisting of Voltaire ISR 9600 switch routers, host channel adapters and 256 dual Intel Xeon compute nodes. Voltaire's InfiniBand solutions provide seamless, high speed connectivity and scalability for high performance computing (HPC) environments. OSC, a state supercomputing and networking resource, is using two Voltaire ISR 9600 InfiniBand switch routers, embedded with VoltaireVision management software, to build a 128 node cluster based on Intel Dual Xeon servers. The cluster will support the OSC's advanced MPI-based applications. Voltaire's ISR 9600 is the highest port-count (96 ports) to be certified by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), distinguishing it as the most scalable, certified InfiniBand switch router on the market today. Voltaire offers a complete family of InfiniBand solutions for HPC applications that balance high-performance hardware with a production-ready, standards-based software stack. The result is unmatched performance within InfiniBand clusters and seamless connectivity with the existing infrastructure. "We chose to work with Advanced Clustering Technologies and Voltaire because of their leadership positions in the HPC market and extensive experience in delivering customized, scalable solutions to technical computing customers," said, Al Stutz, OSC Chief Operating Officer. "With the addition of Voltaire's InfiniBand solutions to our cluster, we expect to gain significant performance improvements to our MPI-based applications." "When looking at the computational needs of OSC, we chose our Pinnacle 2X200 compute nodes, because of their ability to provide the fastest possible interconnect speed when using Voltaire's InfiniBand solutions. It is our pleasure to continue our service to OSC with this new project, and build upon our relationship with Voltaire in providing high performance clustering solutions," said Advanced Clustering Vice President of Sales, Shelly Matthews. OSC is a leader in researching InfiniBand technology's uses in high performance computing environments. In collaboration with OSC, Ohio State University researchers have developed software, called MVAPICH, to enable the use of message passing interface (MPI) on InfiniBand. Major clusters around the world, including those at OSC, use this software on their production systems. OSC researchers also are working with Voltaire to find ways to use advanced network features to improve file system and database operations. "We are very pleased that OSC, a pioneer in high performance computing and networking, selected Voltaire InfiniBand solutions to power their Intel-based server cluster," said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "We look forward to working with Advanced Clustering Technologies and OSC to build a high performance computing cluster that delivers the performance of a mainframe solution at a greatly reduced cost."