SYSTEMS

IWILL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of high-end server, workstation and appliance solutions, and PathScale, developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux clusters, have announced that IWILL’s AMD Opteron processor-based system boards with standard HTX slots are being offered with the PathScale InfiniPath InfiniBand HTX Interconnect to deliver unprecedented low-latency performance for users. This announcement was made today at the 25th annual Computex Taipei Conference, Asia’s largest IT show. “The combination of IWILL system boards and the PathScale InfiniPath interconnect can efficiently and reliably scale to thousands of nodes,” explained Mason Su, worldwide general manager for IWILL Corporation. “Our commitment to supporting the latest advanced technologies means that our resellers and system OEMs will always experience the best possible performance from IWILL’s HPC systems.” Optimized for communications-sensitive applications, PathScale InfiniPath is the industry's lowest-latency Linux cluster interconnect for message passing (MPI) applications. Operating on an IWILL DK8-HTX server board, InfiniPath achieved an all time record-low MPI latency of 1.32 microseconds on the standard Ohio State MPI benchmarks. InfiniPath also achieved a peak bi-directional bandwidth of 1842 MB/s and achieves half of this peak bandwidth at 385 byte messages (streaming), the best in the industry. This means that SMP-class performance will now be available to commodity-priced compute clusters, increasing application performance, cluster utilization and user productivity. “IWILL and PathScale are leveraging five important industry standards: HyperTransport, InfiniBand, OpenIB, MPICH and the AMD64 Direct Connect Architecture,” explained Harry Hirschman, director of PathScale’s InfiniPath marketing unit. “By supporting these latest open standards, IWILL and PathScale are delivering low-latency HPC solutions that are superior in nearly all respects to other systems using older, proprietary interconnect technologies.” PathScale InfiniPath HTX Adapters and AMD Opteron processor-based servers with IWILL DK8-HTX system boards offering the new standard HTX slots will ship in June and are now orderable from over 20 leading Linux systems providers including: Alexander Technology (Australia), Angstrom Microsystems (USA), Appro International (USA), Aravision (Taiwan), Compusys (UK), Dalco AG (Switzerland), DataSwift (France), E4 Computer Engineering (Italy), Gridcore AB (Sweden), Hard Data (Canada), Megware (Germany), NovaGlobal (Singapore), Progression Infonet (India), Rackable Systems (USA), Scalable Systems (Singapore), Streamline Computing (UK), Sumisho Electronics (Japan), T-Platforms (Russia), Visual Technology (Japan).