SCIENCE

Mellanox has announced the company's support for the InfiniBand Trade Association's (IBTA) FDR specification. The combination of Mellanox adapter, switch, software, and cables will deliver complete end-to-end FDR InfiniBand interconnect solutions in 2011. The added bandwidth and features will be utilized by supercomputers and mega warehouse data centers to deliver the highest performance, efficiency and scalability for applications in high performance computing, cloud computing, database, financial services, virtualization and Web 2.0 market segments.

For over 10 years and five generations of products, Mellanox has been the leader in bringing InfiniBand technology to market. Mellanox InfiniBand solutions, delivering industry-leading performance and scalability, connect the world's leading high-performance computing systems and storage networks. Mellanox interconnect offloading technology, application accelerations, end-to-end integration and advanced capabilities deliver the highest efficiencies to end-users in HPC, enterprise and cloud computing.

"As we map out future requirements for our next generation systems, network bandwidth, communication management offload, and GPU efficiency are high on our list," said Richard Graham, distinguished staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "We look forward to when Mellanox goes to market with its end-to-end FDR InfiniBand solutions, which will provide ORNL with critical clustering performance and research capabilities."

Mellanox FDR InfiniBand technology will deliver more than an 80 percent increase in throughput, new sophisticated end-to-end data reliability and scaling mechanisms, and higher utilization of server and storage resources. The platform targets new application acceleration innovations as well as updated versions of Mellanox's industry leading GPU and collective offload acceleration engines to deliver best in class efficiency. Faster and more efficient data transmissions will offer a range of benefits for next-generation computing architectures when built on emerging standards such as PCIe 3.0 and future CPU platforms.

"The demand for more computing power, efficiency and scalability is accelerating in the HPC, enterprise, cloud computing and Web 2.0 markets," said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. "InfiniBand technology provides the critical attributes needed for efficient interconnect. Our next generation of IBTA-compliant FDR InfiniBand end-to-end solutions will provide tangible application performance, economic and power benefits to our customers."

"The growth in commercial high-performance computing usage, latency issues in financial markets and the rapidly evolving cloud computing market are driving the need for improved I/O performance and more networking bandwidth," said John Barr, Distinguished Analyst at the 451 Group. "This is creating a large demand for higher throughput interconnect solutions, such as FDR InfiniBand, that can improve both application scalability and performance."

"As data center technologies and architectures 'evolve', they demand more and more I/O performance and networking speeds," said Sergis Mushell, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner. "FDR InfiniBand solutions will help address these requirements, as silicon and system vendors begin implementing solutions based on FDR in the 2011 timeframe."

"FDR is the next step in the evolution of InfiniBand," said Jie Wu, Research Director at IDC. "Products based on FDR will address critical networking bandwidth and I/O performance issues which will help improve the overall system performance and drive continued growth of InfiniBand in both HPC and enterprise markets."

"The demand for higher performance continues unabated," said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. "HPC users want to run more jobs and more sophisticated programs - FDR is the next step, and should begin to appear in components and systems in 2011. The Mellanox news is very timely."