InfiniBand Connects 60% of HPC Systems

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, shared the latest TOP500 List results, which reveal that IB remains the most used HPC interconnect.

Additionally, the majority of newly listed TOP500 supercomputers are accelerated by IB technology. These results reflect continued industry demand for IB’s combination of network bandwidth, low latency, scalability and efficiency.

IB connects 60% of the HPC systems on the list as well as 48% of the petascale systems.

Furthermore, over half of the new HPC systems that were added to the TOP500 List leverage IB, 2-3 times more compared to proprietary options.

Systems featured in the list include the new artificial intelligence supercomputer from Facebook, which underscores the impact that IB is having on deep learning and AI applications that require high speed performance and compute efficiency.

IB EDR 100Gb/s, the fastest interconnect technology currently available, grew 2.5 times compared to the November list published six months ago. One of these new systems delivered the highest efficiency for newly added systems at 94%.

“As demonstrated on the June 2017 TOP500 supercomputer list, IB is the high-performance interconnect of choice for HPC and deep learning platforms,” said Bill Lee, IBTA marketing working group co-chair. “The key capabilities of RDMA, software-defined architecture, and the smart accelerations that the IB providers have brought with their offering resulted in enabling world-leading performance and scalability for IB-connected supercomputers.”

As HPC applications continue to evolve, especially in the case of AI and deep learning, system architects can rely on IB for network capabilities – both today and well into the future as evident in the IBTA Roadmap.

The TOP500 List is published twice per year and ranks the top supercomputers worldwide based on the LINPAC benchmark rating system, providing statistics for tracking trends in system performance and architecture.