InfiniBand Accelerates Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit HPC

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, highlighted the latest TOP500 List results that report the world’s new fastest supercomputer,

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit system, is accelerated by Mellanox IB EDR.

IB now powers the top three and four of the top five systems.

The latest rankings underscore IB’s continued position as the interconnect of choice for the most demanding HPC platforms.

IB technology continues to dominate the HPC category of the TOP500 List, representing nearly 60% of all HPC systems listed. The HPC category includes academic, research and government fields, which all require high bandwidth and compute efficiency for processing massive, complex data sets. With unmatched network bandwidth, latency, scalability and efficiency, as well as a robust technical development roadmap, the industry can continue to rely on the IB specification today and into the future.

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The latest TOP500 List received submissions from 27 countries, demonstrating an international awareness of the wide-ranging benefits of investing in HPC capabilities and applications. Notably, IB was reported as powering nearly half of the countries’ number one systems. This is a testament to the important role that standards-based solutions, such as those developed by the IBTA and its members, play in supporting global efforts to improve regional economies and research through HPC.

The TOP500 List is steadily evolving to feature even more non-HPC systems in its ranks, which include enterprise, hyperscale and cloud deployments. In fact, almost half of the platforms in the latest results can be categorized as non-HPC, most of which are Ethernet-based. The IBTA is excited to draw attention to the growing number of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) capable systems, which constitute over 30% of total Ethernet listings.

“As the makeup of the world’s fastest supercomputers evolve to include more non-HPC systems such as cloud and hyperscale, the IBTA remains confident in the IB Architecture’s flexibility to support the increasing variety of demanding deployments,” said Bill Lee, IBTA marketing working group co-chair. “As evident in the latest TOP500 List, the reinforced position of IB among the most powerful HPC systems and growing prominence of RoCE-capable non-HPC platforms demonstrate the technology’s unparalleled performance capabilities across a diverse set of applications.”

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

The IBTA is led by a steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle and QLogic. Other members of the IBTA represent enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the IB and RoCE specifications.