SCIENCE

The InfiniBand Trade Association has announced that, according to the latest TOP500 list of the most powerful systems in the world, InfiniBand-connected systems grew 18 percent year-over-year, up to 215 systems in November 2010 from 182 in November 2009. The IBTA also announced InfiniBand is being used this week to drive the world's fastest network -- SCinet -- to deliver demonstrations across the SC10 exhibit floor, including a real-time flight simulator in 3D at speeds up to 120Gb/s.

"InfiniBand growth on the TOP500 corresponds with the 21 percent year over year revenue growth IDC is seeing in our InfiniBand research," said Lucinda Borovick, research VP at IDC. "InfiniBand has been dominant in high performance computing for several years; our research shows us that the InfiniBand community will continue to drive innovation in the market, meeting the demands of this customer base."

InfiniBand represents more than 43 percent of all systems on the TOP500. InfiniBand connects the majority of the Top100 with 61 percent, the Top200 with 58 percent, and the Top300 with 51 percent.

The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the TOP500 list has grown 65 percent, from 1.4 million in Nov. 2009 to 2.3 million in Nov. 2010. InfiniBand connects the majority of the Petaflop systems on the Top10 with four out of seven.

With 96 percent system efficiency, InfiniBand is the only non-proprietary, open-standard I/O that provides the interconnect technology required to handle supercomputing's high demand for CPU cycles without time wasted on I/O transactions. InfiniBand is the most efficient I/O used for inter-server communication in the TOP500.

The TOP500 list is published twice a year and ranks the most powerful computers worldwide, providing valuable statistics for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures.

InfiniBand Drives the World's Fastest Network

Every year at the SC10 conference, over 100 volunteers come together to build SCinet, the world's fastest network. As part of the SCinet architecture, InfiniBand is used to support distributed high performance computing application demonstrations. For SC10, the InfiniBand fabric will consist of Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40, 80, and 120-gigabit per second (Gb/s) circuits linking together various organizations and vendors with high-speed 120Gb/s circuits providing backbone connectivity throughout the SCinet InfiniBand switching infrastructure.

This year's demonstrations include:

• Flight simulator in 3D -- visitors are able experience a "cockpit" view as they fly over Salt Lake City, UT and see real-time rendering and image distribution.
• Remote Desktop over InfiniBand (RDI) -- enables exhibitors to share simulations, presentation and videos in real time. RDI provides the highest visualization for scientific applications and demonstrates cloud connectivity.

"InfiniBand helps drive this most powerful and advanced network in the world," said Eric Dube, SCinet/InfiniBand Co-Chair. "SCinet's InfiniBand network provides a high capacity networking infrastructure with very low latency that supports revolutionary applications and network experiments that can only be demonstrated on this type of network."

IBTA at SC10 This Week

This week, the IBTA is exhibiting at SC10 in New Orleans in booth #1161, featuring interactive demos and presentations. Demos featured in the IBTA booth include:

• Bay Microsystems: Extending InfiniBand Globally
• Mellanox: 3D Real-Time Visualization over InfiniBand
• Obsidian: Long haul encrypted InfiniBand over 10Gb Ethernet
• System Fabric Works: Cloud Computing for HPC Applications

Additionally, Paul Grun, chief scientist at System Fabric Works and member of the IBTA's steering committee, will be presenting a Birds of Feather on November 16 at 12:15 pm on the topic "RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) -- Next Generation RDMA Network." The session will present the concept and theory of RoCE and include a panel discussion.