University of Oklahoma Deploys QLogic IB

QLogic Corp., a leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced the University of Oklahoma (OU) Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) deployed QLogic InfiniBand adapters and switches as part of its newest Linux cluster, known as Sooner. OU researchers will use Sooner to study and model tornadoes, in hopes of improving early warning systems and reducing the financial toll and the number of lives lost to these powerful windstorms.

OU Information Technology’s director of supercomputing Henry Neeman and his OSCER colleagues installed QLogic 7200 Series double data rate (DDR) InfiniBand adapters, based on the QLogic TrueScale architecture, and QLogic SilverStorm 9000 Series InfiniBand core and edge switches to Sooner during the ‘in-place’ transition from OU’s previous cluster, TopDawg.

"OSCER serves more than 400 students, faculty, and staff in virtually every science and engineering discipline, as well as in medicine and business," Neeman said. "As we transitioned from our previous HPC cluster to Sooner, we were challenged with maintaining existing levels of service to the rest of the university with minimal down time. We successfully tackled that challenge and look forward to helping researchers as they attempt to uncover clues to the mysteries of tornado behavior."

"The exceptional performance of QLogic InfiniBand adapters and switches on a variety of modeling applications at other institutions demonstrated to us that this was a good fit for the university given their leadership standing in the meteorological research community," said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. "The optimized, high-bandwidth, low-latency provided by QLogic end-to-end InfiniBand networking solutions means that more modeling can be achieved by institutions in a shorter period of time, ultimately moving researchers to faster results."

Sooner consists of 534 compute nodes connected through QLogic 7200 Series DDR adapters in a 2:1 fat tree topology. The core switch of this network topology, the QLogic director-class SilverStorm 9240 288 port DDR switch, connects to 37 QLogic SilverStorm 9024 24 Port DDR InfiniBand switches, dispersed across 28 racks. The November 2008 Top500 list of Supercomputers ranks the Sooner Linux cluster in the 91st position and reports that Sooner has achieved 28 TFLOPs at 83 percent efficiency.

QLogic InfiniBand Adapters
Run Faster, Scale Higher with TrueScale
Backed by an industry-best, three-year warranty, QLogic 7200 Series adapters deliver industry-leading 20Gb DDR InfiniBand performance in a cluster interconnect, allowing organizations to gain maximum advantage and return on their investment by driving up the utilization of high performance computing infrastructure. The 7200 Series, based on the QLogic TrueScale DDR ASIC platform, is designed from the ground up to provide HPC cluster interconnectivity with the highest messaging rate and lowest latency available. QLogic 7200 Series InfiniBand adapters are the first to deliver up to 26 million messages per second between computing nodes at low scalable latencies. With a low-power design, the 7200 Series is environmentally friendly and highly reliable. The 7200 Series adheres to the OpenFabrics Distribution (OFED) standard and has been certified with all major independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) for plug-and-play interoperability.

QLogic SilverStorm 9000 Series
Maximizes Cluster Connectivity,
Minimizes Data Center Costs
QLogic SilverStorm 9000 Series multi-protocol fabric directors support high performance computing, database clustering and grid utility computing applications. The SilverStorm 9000 Series maximizes cluster and grid computing interconnect performance while simplifying and reducing data center costs. The director leverages the latest InfiniBand-based technologies to provide industry-leading port densities, throughput performance, and ultra low latency. Incorporating the innovative Virtual I/O Controller (VIC) technology, the SilverStorm 9000 Series enables hosts on InfiniBand fabrics to transparently access either Fibre Channel or Ethernet networks or both. VIC technology eliminates the cost and complexity of running multiple server physical connections for storage, network, and inter-processor communications and allows each virtual network type to scale independently over a ‘single wire’ connection.