McGill University Deploys QLogic IB Switches and Adapters

QLogic Corp. announced that its TrueScale InfiniBand
solutions have been deployed in a new HPC cluster at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada’s leading scientific research institute.

The new Linux cluster
includes more than 1200 IBM System x iDataPlex nodes, interconnected with
QLogic TrueScale QDR InfiniBand switches and adapters, and delivers the
fastest supercomputer performance in Quebec to support scientific and
industrial research

McGill University is part of CLUMEQ, whose member
institutions include Consortium Laval (CL), Universite du Quebec (U), McGill
(M) and Eastern Quebec (EQ). CLUMEQ is part of Compute Canada, Canada’s
national HPC platform to support leading edge research. Established in 2001,
CLUMEQ has operations in Montreal and Quebec City.

"We needed a modular, flexible, and scalable HPC
cluster for this project, and the combination of QLogic’s TrueScale InfiniBand
architecture with Performance Scaled Messaging and IBM’s iDataPlex cluster and
IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) delivers outstanding performance,"
said Dr. Bryan Caron, CLUMEQ Director of Business Operations, McGill
University. "This system will provide an important resource for
multidisciplinary research efforts across Canada."

"iDataPlex and GPFS were designed to provide massive
scalability in HPC clusters," said Chris Pratt, Strategic Initiatives
Executive at IBM Canada. "With its high message passing performance,
QLogic’s TrueScale InfiniBand architecture ensures that the full power of our
servers and file system are available to applications running on this
cluster."

QLogic TrueScale QDR InfiniBand solutions provide McGill
(and through CLUMEQ, Compute Canada) with message rates, low latency and bandwidth for moving data to and from storage.

"QLogic’s Performance Scaled Messaging is the only
interconnect software that is fully optimized to deliver the highest MPI
performance with the lowest latency," said Joseph Yaworski, director of
HPC Product and Solution Marketing, QLogic. "McGill University’s new
project is another example of how IBM and QLogic are working together to
provide best-in-class Linux clusters to the HPC community."