InfiniBand Powers More Than 50 Percent of the Systems on the TOP500
BEAVERTON, Ore., July 15 -- The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) today announced that InfiniBand for the first time powers more than 50 percent of the TOP500 and continues to be the most widely used high performance interconnect. The TOP500.org, a list of the known 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems, reported that InfiniBand powers 257 systems, 51.4 percent of the list – a 15.8 percent year-over-year growth from June 2014. This growth can be attributed to the performance and efficiency benefits that InfiniBand delivers.
The demand for higher bandwidth, lower latency and higher message rates along with the need for application acceleration is driving continued adoption of InfiniBand in traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as commercial HPC, cloud and enterprise data centers. The latest version of InfiniBand, EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) InfiniBand delivering 100 Gbps, is gaining traction in the industry and enters the TOP500 for the first time, powering three systems.
“The TOP500 delivers a valued industry snapshot of the technologies that are driving the most powerful computing systems in the world and the continued prominence of InfiniBand as the technology of choice for these systems is a testament to its performance and efficiency,” said Bill Lee, co-chair of the IBTA Marketing Working Group. “Enterprise data center managers look to this list for guidance. Once a technology appears on the list, we later see significant adoption, not only in commercial HPC such as oil and gas exploration, but in database and Big Data analytics, storage appliances and web search as well.”
Leading the TOP500 in Performance and Efficiency
While EDR InfiniBand is beginning to ramp, FDR (Fourteen Data Rate) InfiniBand at 56 Gbps continues to be the most used technology on the TOP500, connecting 156 systems. For Petascale performance systems, InfiniBand connects 33 systems, up from 24 in June 2014. It also continues to be the leading interconnect for accelerator-based systems, covering 77 percent of the list.
In addition to its performance benefits, InfiniBand is the most efficient I/O in the TOP500, powering the most efficient system on the list with 99.8% efficiency. It provides the only open-standard I/O that provides the interconnect technology required to handle supercomputing’s high demand for CPU cycles without time wasted on I/O transactions. InfiniBand is the most efficient I/O used for inter-server communication in the TOP500.
The full TOP500 list is available at www.top500.org.
About the InfiniBand Trade Association
The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Avago Technologies, Cray, HP, 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 specification. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand 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.
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Source: InfiniBand Trade Association
