Voltaire Leads IB Deployments on New Top500 List

Voltaire Ltd. delivered more than 50 percent of the InfiniBand deployments – more than double the share of any other InfiniBand systems vendor — on the 32nd edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Voltaire switches and software power the top supercomputers in several countries including the U.S. (NNSA/Los Alamos’ Roadrunner, #1 on the list), China (Shanghai Supercomputer Center’s Dawning 5000A, #10 on the list) and Japan (Tokyo Tech’s TSUBAME, #29 on the list).

“First deployed in 2006, Tokyo Tech’s grid-enabled TSUBAME supercomputer was upgraded with graphics processing units to maintain its position as one of the fastest supercomputers outside of the United States and today has reached a peak performance of 170 TFLOPS from the previous 110 TFLOPS,” said Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, the TSUBAME project leader at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). “The high performance and low latency of Voltaire’s InfiniBand switches readily accommodate such a dramatic performance upgrade, enabling TSUBAME to expand its applicability to advanced computing jobs including structural and fluid dynamics, nano-materials science, as well as large-scale text mining.”

“Voltaire InfiniBand switches deliver the interconnect performance to break computing records around the world,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “Voltaire’s customers that are on this new list operate the top systems in their geographic regions and also in their industries which range from government and education to energy, life sciences and manufacturing. In fact, 88% of the InfiniBand commercial HPC deployments were delivered by Voltaire. We congratulate these customers on their success and would like to thank them for selecting Voltaire and helping us to continue Voltaire’s InfiniBand leadership position on the Top500.”

Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand switches deliver 20 Gb/s bandwidths and latencies of less than one microsecond to accelerate application performance by as much as 300% as compared to using Ethernet. Moreover, the switches’ power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to Gigabit Ethernet offerings.

Last month, Voltaire announced the December availability of the Grid Director 4036, the first of Voltaire’s family of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches. Additional director-class 40 Gb/s switches are expected to be available in Q2 of 2009.