SYSTEMS

SC2002, BALTIMORE, MD, Paceline Systems Corporation, the leader in intelligent, enterprise-class InfiniBand fabric solutions, today announced InfiniBand Application Starter Kits for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market. Anchored around the Paceline 4100 intelligent InfiniBand switch, the kit provides all of the necessary hardware and software components including Message Passing Interface (MPI) middleware for organizations to rapidly deploy high performance computing clusters interconnected with an intelligent InfiniBand fabric. The promotional kit provides savings of 44 percent over the list price of the individual solution components, making it easy for users to compare InfiniBand with legacy system area networks. In a separate announcement today, Paceline announced its 4100 intelligent switch, Apex Software, and new beta sites. Paceline also announced that it has signed an agreement with Abba Technologies to resell Paceline’s InfiniBand solutions. Abba, based in Albuquerque, NM, provides a range of professional services, software and hardware solutions for enterprise and scientific applications. “To date, the HPC cluster market has only had access to proprietary products with a fairly narrow set of capabilities,” said Andrew Baca, president and CEO, Abba Technologies. “We believe InfiniBand will completely change this market because it is a technology specified, developed and tested by the collaborative efforts of over a hundred significant worldwide organizations. We see the rich set of features included in Paceline’s intelligent InfiniBand switches and Apex Software as a strong entry into the HPC market.” Paceline has worked closely with leading suppliers of MPI middleware, including MPI Software Technology, Inc. (MSTI), to port the de-facto standard protocol to InfiniBand. MPI is used by over 80 percent of the HPC cluster market, and by adding InfiniBand support to these implementations, thousands of users can quickly begin exploiting the performance of this new I/O architecture. MSTI’s MPI/Pro will be the first commercial MPI product designed specifically for InfiniBand technology. “As the leading developer of commercial-grade MPI middleware, MSTI has long recognized the benefits that InfiniBand has to offer the HPC market,” said Jennifer Skjellum, president and CEO of MSTI. “We believe the price and performance advantages of InfiniBand address several critical needs among our customer base, and working in partnership with Paceline, we will introduce a version of MPI/Pro that enables HPC users to quickly and easily migrate their applications to InfiniBand fabrics. The MPI/Pro architecture is optimized to deliver exceptional performance on InfiniBand.” InfiniBand is an open, cost-effective I/O architecture that delivers an 8 times increase in bandwidth over traditional Gigabit Ethernet and TCP/IP interconnects; it delivers a 90 percent reduction in latency and eliminates communications overhead that consumes as much as 50 percent of server CPU cycles. Priced at less than $1,000 per intelligent switch port, Paceline’s switches provide a significantly lower cost alternative to proprietary system area networks used in many existing clusters. Additionally, the 4100 includes embedded Paceline Apex Software, which makes InfiniBand fabrics as easy to deploy and use as Ethernet. “High-performance parallel computing environments, as well as enterprise database clusters, will derive significant benefits from open, standards-based InfiniBand clustering solutions that deliver dramatic performance gains at a lower cost than proprietary fabrics,” said Barry Kallander, president and CEO of Paceline Systems. “The HPC market is embracing InfiniBand, and Paceline is ensuring that organizations can deploy our switches and fabric management software as quickly and easily as possible. Our Application Starter Kit provides customers an end-to-end solution using best-of-breed components that are fully tested and ‘plug-and-play’ in the most popular applications.”