VISUALIZATION

Small Tree Communications, a leading Mac network solutions provider, has announced the immediate availability of the fastest-ever InfiniBand products available for the Mac. InfiniBand is a low latency cluster interconnect technology that offers transfer speeds up to 10Gb/sec using cost effective copper cabling. InfiniBand technology from Mellanox, coupled with Small Tree's Mac OS X InfiniBand software, brings industry leading InfiniBand network performance to the Power Mac G5 and Xserve G5. Small Tree Communications' breakthrough clustering solution has been certified with Ohio State University's (OSU)'s MVAPICH MPI layer, for Mac Enterprise and Supercomputing customer applications. "64-bit platforms demand the highest performance interconnect for scalability, efficiency and return on investment," said Dave Sheffler, vice president of worldwide sales, Mellanox Technologies. "As the driving force behind standard InfiniBand solutions, Mellanox is pleased to support Small Tree InfiniBand technology and Apple's Xserve G5. MAC customers can now expect to get the best clustering and storage performance from their technical and data center applications." "Since the announcement of the System X at Virginia Tech Terascale Computing Facility, there has been tremendous interest and pent-up demand for InfiniBand on Mac OS X," said Corky Seeber, president of Small Tree Communications. "And we are dedicated to providing support for InfiniBand on Mac OS X and meeting that demand. Small Tree Communications was founded with the commitment to being at the forefront of networking technology for the Mac and to being first to market with leading edge networking products and solutions. Small Tree is proud to add InfiniBand solutions to its product line for the Mac community." "With dual G5 processing power and up to 8GB of ECC Memory, Xserve G5 is affordable, easy to manage and powerful -- making it the perfect platform for high performance computing," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "Small Tree Communications' InfiniBand technology delivers high performance and low latency cluster technology to our enterprise customers that benefit from the strong performance of the powerful Xserve G5 and Power Mac G5." InfiniBand technology is the solution of choice for enterprise and supercomputer customers due to the very high performance and low latency characteristics of the InfiniBand cluster fabric. InfiniBand provides the high bandwidth communication needed between the processors within the cluster with a non-proprietarily hardware scheme. Seeber continues, "In order to provide the best possible InfiniBand solution to the Apple community, Small Tree has been collaborating with Virginia Tech and has improved its InfiniBand performance significantly, allowing Virginia Tech to reach even higher levels of performance." "The Terascale Computing Facility At Virginia Tech chose Small Tree Communications as its partner for Infiniband software on the System X supercomputer, based on their deep expertise in supporting high performance communications systems," said Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, Director Terascale Computing Facility. "This partnership will enable researchers using System X to maximize the performance of cutting-edge computational science and engineering applications." A key element for enabling a successful InfiniBand HPC solution is incorporating Ohio State University's Message Passing Interface (MPI) for InfiniBand. A widely adopted programming interface for supercomputing clusters, MPI provides low latency communication between processors in the cluster and ensures application portability between different architectures, making it easy for customers to move supercomputing applications to a Mac cluster. OSU's implementation is the most popular for use with InfiniBand interconnected supercomputers. In order to ensure that this InfiniBand solution is reliable in addition to being optimized for the OS X platform, Small Tree has also been collaborating with Ohio State University. OSU has been using Small Tree's Software to certify the latest version of the open source MPI (MVAPICH) port to the Xserve G5. "We are seeing excellent stability and performance with Small Tree's IBA driver. For 2.0 GHz G5 systems, we consistently record MPI-level one-way latency of 6.1 microseconds and unidirectional bandwidth of 931 Million Bytes/sec with MVAPICH 0.9.4 version running with Small Tree's IBA driver," says Prof. D.K. Panda of the Network-Based Computing Laboratory at The Ohio State University. Small Tree's InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) is a 133MHz, 64-bit capable PCI-X card compatible with Power Mac G5 and Xserve G5. Small Tree provides highly optimized driver and firmware settings to enable the best possible performance out of the InfiniBand cluster network and is able to support the customer's entire InfiniBand hardware infrastructure requirements including Switches, Cables and HCAs. Full product information, ordering information and pricing can be found on Small Tree's website at http://www.small-tree.com/infiniband.htm .