SYSTEMS

InfiniCon Systems, Inc., the leader in end-to-end networking for high performance business computing, announced the launch of its 3.0 architecture aimed at solidifying the company's focus on serving the needs of the global high performance business computing market. InfiniCon will demonstrate its capabilities next week at LinuxWorld Boston in Booth #114. "The new realities of our customers' vertical applications and increasingly global nature of our customer base - especially in the Asian and European markets - have changed the way we look at the business," said CEO Russ Hawkins. "Since the introduction of InfiniBand technology in 2000, we have evolved from a technology company in a nascent industry, into a true solution provider for high performance, end-to-end networking. These changes in our architectural strategy support our goal to be as innovative and flexible as possible in addressing the needs of our customers." New Architectural Approach Extends, Enhances High Performance Networking Available immediately, InfiniCon's Software Release 3.0 heralds a new architectural approach for the company's InfiniBand-based hardware and software platform. The platform includes all host software, switch embedded software, and the company's unique FastFabric tools, providing far greater flexibility to customers and opening the architecture to enable the use of 3rd party tools and applications. "Technical computing markets for higher speed interconnects based on standards are growing at a high rate, driven in large part by the success of clusters. Clustered systems have gained due to a combination of processor performance increases and lower system prices. Infiniband-based solutions represent a new segment in the market, with performance above Ethernet based solutions and prices below proprietary interconnects. InfiniCon designs hardware and software solutions to meet user requirements for cluster interconnects from some of the most demanding end-users in the industry," says Earl Joseph, IDC vice president of technical computing solutions. The new software architecture is now extensible, providing significant value-add to commercial customers in current and future software releases, including large cluster scaling, enterprise-class reliability, Virtual I/O, and server virtualization. One key area of extensibility is the incorporation of the 3.0 software into next generation server architectures that embed InfiniBand on the motherboard - either on servers or on blade platforms - eliminating the need for a Host Channel Adapter (HCA) to access the InfiniBand network. Specifically designed to enable these environments, Appro chose InfiniCon's host software for their recently-introduced next generation XtremeBlade solution, providing InfiniBand interfaces to all external data and storage networks. "Partnering with InfiniCon provides our customers with an extremely efficient, high-performance interconnect for high-density blade clusters," said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. "By incorporating InfiniCon's outstanding InfiniBand fiber management software into our XtremeBlade solution, our customers can build and manage high-bandwidth clusters today on an infrastructure that is flexible and easy to scale." Release 3.0 also introduces a number of significant new enhancements including support for Linux 2.6, scalability to over 1000 node fabrics, Oracle certification, certification of additional commercial MPI packages, additional fabric reliability features, performance enhancements for InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols, and significant additions to FastFabric tools for ease of management. Virtual I/O: Faster Time to Results for High Performance Business Computing InfiniCon's patented Virtual I/O capabilities offer key additional capabilities to large cluster implementations, as seamless integration of I/O into a single high-speed, low latency link during cluster scale-out simplifies networks, and reduces cost by eliminating the need for server NICs and redundant SAN and LAN switches. InfiniCon customer The Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP), which provides R&D solutions to the oil, natural gas and automotive industries, boasts one of the first InfiniBand-interconnected Linux clusters in its market - a 200 processor (AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon and Itanium) cluster with approximately 300 users and 50 internal codes. "The ability to share the traffic for MPI-based applications, Ethernet, and Fibre Channel with InfiniCon's network infrastructure has dramatically increased the performance and reliability of our HPC Linux cluster, delivering 30 Gbs of bandwidth with low latency access," said Stephane Requena, IFP High Performance Computing Architect. "Just as impressive as the performance is the ease of management - we have experienced far less administrative complexity with the InfiniCon solution." The only vendor with a complete set of proven, production-ready offerings for high performance Linux, Mac OS, and Windows environments, InfiniCon's end-to-end networking solutions enable faster time to results for computationally intensive problems in diverse fields including oil and gas exploration, automotive and aerospace design, financial analysis, and many others. In use by key global Fortune 500 companies including Toyota, Boeing, and ChevronTexaco, InfiniCon also powers some of the world's largest clusters - including the world's largest Linux cluster at RIKEN.