TOP500.org recently released its latest account of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and, as with previous reports, InfiniBand leads the way. The 47th edition of the bi-annual list shows that 205 of the fastest commercially available systems are accelerated by InfiniBand and OpenFabrics Software (OFS).
The InfiniBand fabric, with the OFS open source software, is the High Performance Computing (HPC) interconnect of choice because it delivers a distinctive combination of superior performance, efficiency, scalability and low latency. InfiniBand is the only open-standard I/O that provides the capability required to handle supercomputing’s high demand for CPU cycles without time wasted on I/O transactions. With today’s supercomputers pushing nearly 100 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark, the need for efficient, low latency performance is higher than ever.
- InfiniBand and OFS systems outperformed competing technologies in overall efficiency, scoring an 85 percent list average for compute efficiency – with one system even reaching an incredible 99.8 percent.
- The technologies enable 70 percent of the HPC system segment. This segment includes academic, research and government fields.
- For supercomputers capable of Petascale performance, the number of InfiniBand and OFS systems grew from 33 to 45.
InfiniBand’s ability to carry multiple traffic types over a single connection makes it ideal for clustering, communications, storage and management. As a result, the interconnect technology is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters, storage, and embedded application that scale from two nodes to a single cluster of tens-of-thousands of nodes. Supercomputers powered by OFS reach their highest performance capacity through the speed and efficiency delivered by Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). In turn, OFS enables RDMA fabrics, such as InfiniBand, to run applications that require extreme speeds, Petascale-level scalability and utility-class reliability.
Check out the full list at www.top500.org.
