IB Surpasses Other Interconnect Technologies for World’s Fastest HPC

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, announced that, for the first time, IB has exceeded all other interconnect technologies on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The latest list, available at top500.org, was released June 18 and shows that IB is now being utilized by 210 out of 500 clusters listed.

IB growth in recent years includes:

• From June 2008 – June 2012, the total number of IB-connected systems on the TOP500 list increase 72% from 122 to 210.
• IB connects 40% of the world’s most powerful petaflop systems on the list, 8 out of the 20 systems.
• IB connects 25 of the 30 most efficient systems, including the top two.
• 86% of the accelerator-based systems are connected with IB.

This growth highlights how IB is used to maximize computing and accelerator resources, as well as improves productivity and scalable performance.

FDR IB (Fourteen Data Rate, 14Gb/s data rate per lane) is the fastest growing interconnect technology on the TOP500 with a 10X increase in number of systems versus six months ago.

It addresses the market demand for increased performance in HPC, enterprise, cloud and Web 2.0 networks and is backward compatible with the previous specified IB speeds – SDR, DDR and QDR – and, together with PCIe 3.0, provides a step up for clustering and datacenter interconnect throughput, efficiency, reliability and scalability.

"IB has grown at an incredible rate in the past several years, as we continue to see demand for higher efficiency and lower latency across data centers," said Bill Lee, InfiniBand Trade Association. "IB’s growth in HPC mirrors the growth we’re seeing for IB in the enterprise data center – and specifically for cloud and Web 2.0."

Created in 1999, IB enables low processing overhead and carries multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. As a proven technology, IB is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters and embedded environments that scale from two nodes up to clusters with thousands of nodes.