Voltaire IB Switches Accelerate No. 1 and No. 3 Supercomputers

The high performance and power efficiency of Voltaire Ltd’s switching solutions are connecting the world’s most energy efficient supercomputers, according to the new Green500 List. Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand switches are powering the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer at IBM Boeblingen Lab and the world’s fastest Los Alamos Laboratory petaflop supercomputer, which took the No. 3 position for energy performance.

The supercomputers are based on industry-standard technologies and interconnected by Voltaire Grid Director DDR/20 Gbps InfiniBand switches. Delivering 20 Gbps InfiniBand performance, Voltaire switches require on average only 5 watts of power per port, making them a much more energy efficient networking technology than 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Voltaire also delivered the high performance interconnect for many of the other supercomputers on the list.

“One of the most important and challenging problems IT faces is how to address escalating power requirements of large data centers,” said Patrick Guay, Executive Vice President Global Sales and General Manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. “Our customers are realizing the energy efficiency afforded by a Voltaire InfiniBand fabric and are using the solution as part of their virtualization and consolidation strategies.”

“Voltaire solutions are powering both the world’s fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list and the world’s most energy efficient supercomputer on the Green500 list – demonstrating that performance does not come at the expense of efficiency,” Guay added.

“More than 70% of Global 1000 enterprises will face significant data center problems during the next four years requiring substantial capital costs to build new facilities or refurbish existing ones,” said Rakesh Kumar, Research VP, Gartner Research. “Our research has shown that the immediate green IT issues in data centers are around power, cooling and floor space problems. We believe, therefore that user spending should focus on these areas.” In addition, Gartner recommended that during the next two years, “users should select core IT hardware, including servers, storage and networking equipment based on their energy characteristics, as well as on traditional IT metrics like price/performance.”

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