28% Annual Growth for IB on Top 500 HPCs

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its InfiniBand adapters and switch solutions demonstrate the highest growth on the TOP500 in the last two years.

As reported in the 34th edition of the TOP500 list, the growth rate of Mellanox InfiniBand-connected systems has more than doubled compared to the growth rate in 2008, and now represents nearly 37 percent of the TOP500. Mellanox InfiniBand enables the highest system efficiency and utilization, up to 96 percent, and provides users with the best return on investment for their high-performance computing server and storage infrastructure computing requirements. Furthermore, Mellanox InfiniBand is the only industry-standard interconnect chosen to connect two of the world’s PetaScale systems – Los Alamos National Laboratories and China’s National University of Defense Technology.

Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand adapters and switch systems based on its InfiniScale IV switch silicon provide the scalable, low-latency, and power-efficient interconnect for the world’s fastest supercomputers, representing 50 percent of the Top10, 63 percent of the Top100, and the majority of the Top300 systems. Mellanox end-to-end 40Gb/s InfiniBand solutions deliver the leading performance and utilization for the most power efficient systems on the list.

The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the TOP500 list has grown 63.4 percent, from 859,090 in Nov. 2008 to 1,404,164 in Nov. 2009. This growth highlights the increasing demand for InfiniBand as a way to maximize computing resources, productivity and performance in the world’s fastest computer systems.

“The world’s fastest supercomputers rely more on Mellanox’s performance and efficiency-leading InfiniBand solutions to maximize their productivity and return-on-investment,” said Eyal Waldman, president, chairman and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “With the recent announcements of our new ConnectX-2 adapter with CORE-Direct and industry-performance leading IS5000 family of 120Gb/s switch systems, Mellanox continues to push the technology envelope and is providing the high-performance computing and cloud computing industry with scalable performance and efficiency-leading solutions that will enable the next generation of ExaScale-class computing.”

Published twice a year and publicly available, the TOP500 list ranks the world’s most powerful computer systems according to the Linpack benchmark rating system. The TOP500 list is a respected industry report that indicates usage trends in computing and interconnect solutions.

Highlights of InfiniBand usage
on the November 2009 TOP500 list include:

• InfiniBand is the only growing standard interconnect technology, 182 systems, 36.4 percent of the list, up 28 percent from Nov. 2008. Ethernet connected systems declined by 8 percent in the same period of time.
• Mellanox InfiniBand provides the highest system utilization on the TOP500, up to 96 percent system utilization, and represents 28 of the 30 most efficient TOP500 systems, including #1, #2, #3 and #4.
• Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand is the only 40Gb/s proven technology on the list, and enables the high system utilization in the TOP500.
• Mellanox InfiniBand is the only standard interconnect solution for Petascale systems, connecting two of the world’s Petascale systems in USA and China.
• InfiniBand connects the world’s most powerful supercomputers in the Top10 and Top20: 5 of the Top10 (#2, #5, #6, #9, #10), and 9 of the Top20 (#12, #13, #14, #19).
• InfiniBand is the most used interconnect in the Top100, Top200 and Top300: 63 percent of the Top100, 50 percent of the Top200, 46.3% of the Top300.
• All InfiniBand-based systems (182 total supercomputers) use Mellanox solutions.
• Clusters continue to be the dominant system architecture with 83.4 percent of the TOP500 list.
• Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect products present in the TOP500 are used by a diverse list of applications, from large-scale, high-performance computing to commercial technical computing and enterprise data centers.