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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
VOLTAIRE LENDS SUPPORT TO CERN GRID PROJECT
The European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN and Voltaire, a leading provider
of InfiniBand solutions for high performance Grid computing, announced that
Voltaire is contributing to the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications. CERN
openlab (www.cern.ch/openlab) is an industrial partnership which aims
to create and test new Grid computing technologies for storing and analyzing
the huge quantities of data that will be produced by the Large Hadron
Collider, the biggest scientific instrument on the planet, which will start
operations in 2007. Voltaire specializes in providing InfiniBand solutions,
which enable high performance Grid computing applications to run on commodity
servers and storage.
The CERN openlab is a collaboration between CERN researchers and the five
partner companies Enterasys Networks, HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle. Together,
these partners are building the CERN opencluster, a state-of-the-art cluster
for testing prototype Grid applications of increasing power and functionality.
The open, collaborative environment of the partnership places an emphasis on a
common development program for data-intensive Grid computing based on open
standards. Voltaire is the first company to join the CERN openlab
collaboration as a contributor, a status created to allow smaller high-tech
companies with promising solutions to take part in this collaboration for a
one-year period, along with the principal partners, who are sponsoring the
collaboration over three years.
CERN and its academic partners around the globe are pioneering a worldwide
Grid called the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) which is expected to be the largest
data-intensive application of the decade. The LCG will represent the key link
between the LHC detectors and nearly ten thousand scientists and tens of
thousands of computers around the world. This computing Grid will be used to
analyze data from the LHC, sifting through petabytes of particle collision
data, (a petabyte is a 1 million gigabytes) looking for clues to the origins
of the universe. The LCG will rely on clusters of computers at CERN and at
hundreds of partner universities and institutes. The InfiniBand technology
from Voltaire was chosen for CERN openlab because it provides the CERN
opencluster interconnects with four essential features: low latency, very high
bandwidth, low CPU overhead and powerful connectivity to storage.
"The high bandwidth, low CPU overhead and scalability of Voltaire's InfiniBand
solutions are particularly interesting to the computer clusters used for high
performance analysis in the LCG," said Sverre Jarp, CTO of CERN openlab. "With
InfiniBand, data can be streamed into our CERN opencluster very quickly with
minimal loss of CPU cycles, so we can retain as many cycles as possible for
the data analysis itself."
"Voltaire brings a new dimension to the CERN openlab partnership," said
Wolfgang von Ruden, head of CERN openlab and of CERN's IT department. "We need
to be able to work with leading IT companies, big and small, in order to
evaluate the most promising technologies for the LCG. Voltaire's contribution
to CERN openlab shows that this can be done, and provides a win-win scenario
for CERN, our established industrial partners and Voltaire."
"It is a privilege to work in the CERN openlab with our partners and industry
leaders such as IBM, HP and Oracle," added Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and chief
executive officer of Voltaire. "Together with CERN and these companies, we aim
to build, test and verify cutting-edge solutions for the future of
cluster-based Grid computing."
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