History 2004: IB Gets Momentum for Super Clusters

InfiniBand (IB) interconnect solutions seemed to be running out of steam.

For the past 6 months, however, and due in large part to its superior speed compared to Ethernet and FC, with 10Gb/s transfer rate via copper wires, it is making a come back for high-performance clusters (HPC), if the following developments are any indication:

• Oracle announced IB support for its forthcoming Oracle Database 10g.
• IBM has signed a 5-year agreement with Topspin Communications IB switches for use with IBM eServer, pSeries, zSeries, iSeries, and xSeries systems.
• Dell Computer, HP and NEC also selected Topspin as IB technology provider for HPC solutions.
• Intel demonstrated >1 teraflop Xeon and IB cluster, while HP showed IB over HPUX at the Supercomputing Conference.
• Sun Microsystems’ HPTC group launched new IB support.
• Several Apple Computer’s PowerMac G5 with IB power the Virginia Tech Cluster.
• Los Alamos Lab deploys a 256-node and Sandia National Labs a 128-node IB cluster from LinuxNetworx.
• Silicon Graphics will use Voltaire products for clustering Altix 350 servers.
• Voltaire and SBS Technologies now deliver 24-port 10Gb/s IB switches at approximately $300 per port.
• Infinicon, which provides a 128-node IB-based network fabric for HPCs, has been selected by Fujitsu for Japan’s Riken 2,000-node lnfiniBand cluster.
• Mellanox surpassed the 20,000 IB port milestone and plans to boost the next-gen PCIe technology with IB.
• The Infiniband Trade Association began to work on the interconnect technology beyond its current limit of 30Gb/s to push it beyond 100Gb/s.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 194 on March 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.