… Big Actor Being Mellanox …

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. said it continues its lead as the global interconnect solution provider for the TOP500 list of supercomputers with IB further growing as the top interconnect of choice for the TOP500 with 224 clusters.

From June 2012 to November 2012, the number of FDR 56Gb/s IB systems increased by nearly 2.3X, including the top two ranked IB systems on the list, showing the increasing demand for higher performance, scalability and efficiency.

The new list showcased the expansion of IB connecting cloud infrastructures. IB enables the most efficient cloud infrastructure on the list, more than 30% higher efficiency than other cloud solutions listed. Furthermore, Mellanox ConnectX IB adapters and switch systems optimize server and storage performance and provide the scalable, low-latency, and power-efficient interconnect for the world’s fastest supercomputers, connecting 43% (10 systems) of all PetaScale based systems (23 systems).

The advanced offloads and accelerations within Mellanox IB solutions enable the most performance efficient system on the TOP500 list, at nearly 96% system and CPU efficiency.

"Mellanox’s scalable IB solutions provide the highest systems utilization in the TOP500 for both high-performance computing and clouds. As the most used interconnect for the TOP500 list and the world’s Petascale systems, Mellanox IB solutions provide the best return-on-investment," said Eyal Waldman, president, chairman and CEO of Mellanox. "We are proud to have the most efficient cloud be interconnected with IB and expect to see more cloud infrastructures adopt IB as their compute and storage interconnect. We’re seeing the cost per cloud or hosted services per transaction/user reduced when using RDMA technology, on either IB or Ethernet with our Virtual Protocol Interconnect technology, due to its efficiency and utilization improvements."

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.

Highlights of IB usage
on the November 2012 TOP500 list include:

• IB is the most used interconnect on the list, connecting 224 systems, nearly 20% more than the 189 Ethernet connected systems.
• Mellanox IB provides the highest system utilization on the TOP500, up to 96% system utilization.
• IB is the most used interconnect in the TOP500: 52% of the TOP100, 53% of the TOP200, 50% of the TOP300, 46% of the TOP400 and 45% of the TOP500.
• FDR IB is the fastest growing interconnect technology on the TOP500 with a 2.3X increase in number of systems versus the June 2012 TOP500 list.
• IB connects 43% of the world’s most powerful Petaflop systems on the list.
• IB connects 7.5X the number of Cray-based systems in the TOP500 systems and 3X the number of Cray-based systems in the TOP100 systems.
• Clusters continue to be the dominant system architecture with 82% of the TOP500 list.
• Mellanox end-to-end IB scalable HPC solutions accelerate 86% of the accelerator-based systems.
• Mellanox IB interconnect solutions 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.