InfiniBand most used interconnect for new systems, and connects nearly half of the Petascale systems
BEAVERTON, Ore. – June 28, 2017 – The InfiniBand® Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand™ specification, today shared the latest TOP500 List results, which reveal that InfiniBand remains the most used High Performance Computing (HPC) interconnect. Additionally, the majority of newly listed TOP500 supercomputers are accelerated by InfiniBand technology. These results reflect continued industry demand for InfiniBand’s unparalleled combination of network bandwidth, low latency, scalability and efficiency.
InfiniBand connects 60 percent of the HPC systems on the list as well as 48 percent of the Petascale systems. Furthermore, over half of the new HPC systems that were added to the TOP500 List leverage InfiniBand, 2-3 times more compared to proprietary options. Systems featured in the list include the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer from Facebook, which underscores the impact that InfiniBand is having on Deep Learning and AI applications that require high speed performance and compute efficiency.
InfiniBand EDR 100 Gb/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 percent.
“As demonstrated on the June 2017 TOP500 supercomputer list, InfiniBand 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 InfiniBand providers have brought with their offering resulted in enabling world-leading performance and scalability for InfiniBand-connected supercomputers.”
As HPC applications continue to evolve, especially in the case of AI and deep learning, system architects can rely on InfiniBand for unmatched network capabilities – both today and well into the future as evident in the IBTA Roadmap.
The TOP500 List (www.top500.org) 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.
About the InfiniBand® Trade Association
The InfiniBand® Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand and the RoCE specifications. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle and QLogic. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand and RoCE specifications. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand and RoCE from an industry perspective through online, marketing and public relations engagements, and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.