Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the immediate availability of its industry-leading, 36-port, 40Gb/s InfiniBand InfiniScale IV switch silicon device architected to address the massive scale-out demands of data centers and high-performance compute centers that require the best price-performance and most energy efficient interconnect. Switch product development platforms are available for OEMs to accelerate time-to-market of their own systems that will fuel the growing InfiniBand switch market, estimated by IDC to have a port shipment CAGR of 54.5% over 2006 to 2011.

InfiniScale IV-based switching platforms enable the following industry-leading capabilities which are critical to overall server and storage performance and efficiency:

• 6X the switching and data capacity vs. 24-port 10GigE switch devices
• 4X the storage I/O throughput critical for backup, snapshot and quickly loading large datasets vs. 8Gb/s Fibre Channel SANs
• 10X lower end-to-end latency performance of mission-critical clustered applications vs. iWARP and 10GigE switch solutions
• 3X the server and storage node cluster scalability when building a 3-tier CLOS fabric vs. 24-port 10GigE switch devices

“Mellanox continues to lead the server and storage interconnect industry with the availability of the highest performing and highest density switch silicon devices that deliver 40Gb/s per port performance, ultra-low latency, and massive scalability to tens of thousands of nodes,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president, and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “InfiniScale IV-based switch systems and ConnectX adapters will provide the fabric for a number of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and optimize multi-core CPU performance of enterprise and high-performance computing applications including database, design automation, financial services, grids, health services, media creation, oil and gas, virtualization, weather analysis, web services, and more.”

InfiniScale IV integrates state-of-the-art traffic management capabilities including congestion control, adaptive routing, multiple subnet support, and port monitoring and mirroring, optimizing total cluster performance and manageability at any scale. Switch product development platforms are available today from Mellanox for benchmarking and accelerating time to market for OEM systems. These 40Gb/s, 36-port, rack mountable systems are available with either microGiGaCN or QSFP connectors compatible with passive and active copper cables and active fiber cabling solutions. Production switch systems from OEMs based on the InfiniScale IV are expected to be available later in 2008 from leading server and infrastructure system OEMs.

“Improved processing power and massive scalability are critical to customers that rely on high-performance computing applications to achieve their business goals,” said Ed Turkel, manager of HPC product marketing for the Scalable Computing & Infrastructure Organization at HP. “Organizations leveraging hundreds to thousands of HP ProLiant rack servers or server blades with switch blades, combined with Mellanox’s InfiniScale IV technology, should realize the full potential, power, and performance of their systems.”

“High-performance computing is constantly finding new applications in both science and industry, fostering new demands for I/O performance,” said Bjorn Andersson, director HPC technologies, Sun Microsystems. “The combination of Sun's innovative blade server, software, storage and switch system technology and Mellanox’s leading 40Gb/s InfiniBand switch silicon delivers outstanding computing performance that addresses a new era of Petascale computing needs.”

“We applaud Mellanox for driving the unbeatable performance of InfiniBand forward, keeping it well-ahead of competing interconnect technologies,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “Our HPC customers that require the highest performing switches should stay tuned for Voltaire’s QDR-based switching platform which we intend to deliver later this year.”

During the opening reception of the International Supercomputing Conference, Mellanox will host a special cocktail reception where the company will showcase the first live public demonstrations of 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based clusters, utilizing ConnectX adapters and InfiniScale IV-based switch systems running applications from ANSYS Fluent and Scalable Graphics. Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based demonstrations and equipment can also be viewed at the following company booths: Appro, Bull, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Supermicro, TYAN (MiTAC), and Voltaire.

“Our strategic partnership with leading-edge companies such as Mellanox enables Appro to be the pioneer of the latest technologies such as 40Gb/s InfiniBand that delivers unparallel I/O connectivity for high-throughput and latency-sensitive clusters,” said Jim Ballew, CTO of Appro. “We are proud to be one of the first companies to demonstrate 40Gb/s InfiniBand supercomputing clusters at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, and be able to provide even higher cluster application performance to large-scale high performance computing deployments.”

“We are pleased to showcase with Mellanox the world's first 40Gb/s InfiniBand clusters that take advantage of our servers' ultimate computing power to accelerate innovation,” said Fabio Gallo, vice-president of HPC Solutions at Bull. “Bull's NovaScale servers with Mellanox ConnectX adapters and InfiniScale IV 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based switches can dramatically accelerate computer modeling and simulations for automotive and aeronautical engineering, oil and gas, biosciences, and financial services applications.”

“As a leading provider of high-performance servers, with InfiniBand built into both our rackmount and SuperBlade™ server solutions, Supermicro is teaming up with Mellanox to deliver leading-edge connectivity for high-performance computing,” said Tau Leng, GM of HPC and Marketing at Super Micro Computer, Inc. “Our live InfiniBand server clusters at ISC'08 offer attendees the opportunity to experience 40Gb/s performance in action.”