Voltaire Switches in Top 10 World’s Most Energy-Efficient Supercomputers

A new report announced last month found that Voltaire Ltd.’s switching technology is connecting the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, according to the latest supercomputing ‘Green500 List‘ announced by the Green500.org. The top seven supercomputers on the list are all comprised of IBM BladeCenter servers and connected with Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand switches, which deliver high performance coupled with low power consumption. Voltaire switches also provide the connectivity for the world’s fastest petaflop supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which took the No. 7 position on the list for energy performance.

In addition, Voltaire delivered the high-performance interconnect for many other supercomputers on the list, used for a variety of applications such as astrophysics, energy, pharmaceutical and global climate research. Delivering 20 Gb/s InfiniBand performance – with 40 Gb/s solutions expected to be available later this month — Voltaire director-class switches require on average only 5 watts of power per port, making them much more energy efficient than10 Gigabit Ethernet core switches that can consume between 18 and 100 watts of power per port.

“Energy use and cost will become the single-most-critical capacity constraint in large data centers by 2010,” said Rakesh Kumar, Research VP, Gartner Research. “As a result, users need to start measuring energy use and efficiency now to be able to use the data for forward planning across many different parts of their data centers’ infrastructure.”

A recent survey commissioned by Voltaire delivered similar findings about the importance of data center energy efficiency: nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believe greening their data centers will be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage. The survey queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

“Voltaire’s clear leadership position on the Green500 list highlights the unique combination of performance and low power consumption that our switches deliver,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “As companies with large data centers plan for their energy usage, we want them to understand that Voltaire offers interconnect technology available today that simultaneously improves application performance and energy efficiency.”