SCIENCE

QLogic announced that its TrueScale InfiniBand solutions have been deployed in a new HPC cluster at McGill University in Montreal, Canada's leading scientific research institute. The new Linux cluster includes more than 1200 IBM System x iDataPlex nodes, interconnected with QLogic TrueScale QDR InfiniBand switches and adapters, and delivers the fastest supercomputer performance in Quebec to support advanced scientific and industrial research.

McGill University is part of CLUMEQ, whose member institutions include Consortium Laval (CL), Universite du Quebec, McGill and Eastern Quebec (EQ). CLUMEQ is part of Compute Canada, Canada's national HPC platform to support leading edge research. Established in 2001, CLUMEQ has operations in Montreal and Quebec City.

"We needed a modular, flexible, and scalable HPC cluster for this project, and the combination of QLogic's TrueScale InfiniBand architecture with Performance Scaled Messaging and IBM's iDataPlex cluster and IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) delivers outstanding performance," said Dr. Bryan Caron, CLUMEQ Director of Business Operations, McGill University. "This system will provide an important resource for multidisciplinary research efforts across Canada."

"iDataPlex and GPFS were designed to provide massive scalability in HPC clusters," said Chris Pratt, Strategic Initiatives Executive at IBM Canada. "With its high message passing performance, QLogic's TrueScale InfiniBand architecture ensures that the full power of our servers and file system are available to applications running on this cluster."

QLogic TrueScale QDR InfiniBand solutions provide McGill (and through CLUMEQ, Compute Canada) with unsurpassed message rates, extremely low latency and massive bandwidth for moving data to and from storage.

"QLogic's Performance Scaled Messaging is the only interconnect software that is fully optimized to deliver the highest MPI performance with the lowest latency," said Joseph Yaworski, director of HPC Product and Solution Marketing, QLogic. "McGill University's new project is another example of how IBM and QLogic are working together to provide best-in-class Linux clusters to the HPC community."