SC Conference - Activity Details

Philip Murphy  (QLogic)

Interconnects - 2: InfiniBand

Tuesday,  02:30PM - 03:00PM

Room 12A/12B

Due to an outstanding delivered price-performance ratio compared to alternative embodiments, high performance computing environments are increasingly being constructed as clusters of ever more powerful server nodes. Realization of the performance potential of such high performance computing clusters requires a scalable interconnect well matched to the network demands generated by HPC applications. To support petascale computing, this interconnect must scale to thousands of nodes, deliver messages with minimal latency, provide extreme node-to-node bandwidth, automatically eliminate avoidable network congestion, and provide for ultra-high messaging rates. In addition to the above stated performance requirements, the ability to rapidly initialize, configure, monitor, diagnose, and repair fabrics is critical to successful deployment. Over the last several years, the technology choice for the high performance computing cluster interconnects has increasingly been InfiniBand. This presentation will discuss recent advances in performance and manageability of InfiniBand networks that are key for enabling petascale computing environments.