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Sandia Nat'l Lab Deploys Voltaire 288 Port InfiniBand Switch

Voltaire announced the general availability and first customer deployment of the Voltaire ISR 9288, the industry's highest port density, most scalable InfiniBand switch for large server clusters and Grids. Sandia National Laboratories is the first of many Voltaire customers to purchase and deploy the new switch to provide the high performance interconnect for supercomputer-class clusters.

The Voltaire ISR 9288 features 288 InfiniBand ports of 10 Gb per second full bisectional bandwidth in a single chassis enabling HPC and enterprise customers to build very large clusters with fewer switching components, simplifying clusters and reducing total cost of ownership. In addition to scalable switching, the Voltaire ISR 9288 features multi-protocol capabilities that provide connectivity to IP and Fibre Channel networks for scalable storage solutions. Moreover, the switch is tuned to work with Voltaire HCA/Ex InfiniBand PCI Express adapters that enable PCI Express-based servers to access the full performance of InfiniBand with up to 20 Gb per second of bandwidth and latency as low as 3.5 microseconds.

Sandia is using the Voltaire ISR 9288 to improve the performance and server utilization of its 128 node P4 Xeon "Catalyst" cluster, which was named to the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers published in June. Future efforts on Catalyst will focus on PCI Express.

"For the past year, Sandia has used our InfiniBand high performance cluster for R&D and science application runs. We've been impressed with the results," said Matt Leininger, computational scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. "A switch with 288 InfiniBand ports in a single chassis greatly simplifies the process of building, scaling and managing large scale clusters of hundreds to thousands of nodes."

"Customer and partner interest in our new 288 port InfiniBand switching solution has been phenomenal -- far beyond what we'd anticipated," said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman of Voltaire. "Clearly, technical computing facilities recognize Voltaire interconnect solutions are a critical building block as they move to large scale cluster and Grid computing."

"No I/O technology fully exploits the benefits of Intel's EM64T and PCI Express technology more than InfiniBand," said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "The combination of these technologies powered by Intel's latest Xeon processor-based platforms are the key ingredients to a perfectly balanced server and cluster architecture that is quickly proliferating into data centers and high performance computing environments. IntelEM64T, PCI Express and InfiniBand technology are changing the shape of business and technical computing."

Voltaire Grid interconnect solutions consist of InfiniBand switch routers, IP routers and Fibre Channel routers, fabric management software, adapters and software that enable high performance applications to run on commodity server, storage and network resources that are virtualized into supercomputers. Commercial HPC customers are increasingly deploying Voltaire solutions to improve the value and performance of their commercial off-the-shelf applications. For example, CAE applications such as fluid dynamics and crash simulation achieve a significant boost using InfiniBand interconnect solutions.