INDUSTRY
InfiniBand Accelerates Deployment of 10Gb/s Compute Clusters
Mellanox Technologies Ltd., the leader in InfiniBand technology, today announced that IWILL, a leading manufacturer of server and workstation motherboards, has selected Mellanox's InfiniHost host channel adapter to provide 10Gb/s Landed on Motherboard (LOM) connections for the DK8S2-IB server platform. This platform represents the world's first server that provides 10Gb/s network connectivity as a feature that ships standard with every system. IWILL selected Mellanox's solution based on the rapid adoption rate of InfiniBand in clustered server applications as well as price/performance advantages over all other 10Gb/s technologies. InfiniBand, the only industry standard I/O technology that natively supports 10Gb/s performance to each node with remote direct memory access (RDMA) and hardware transport offload capabilities, offers a single converged network for communications, clustering and storage. "IWILL servers are designed with industry leading processing performance and networking capabilities," stated Rover Chen, Director of IWILL's Server Division. "Our latest server solution provides simple integration of high-speed connectivity without the additional cost of a separate adapter card. We provide two InfiniBand ports, enabling the most robust and cost-effective server solution for 10 Gigabit per second compute clusters."
In addition to selecting 10Gb/s InfiniBand network connectivity, IWILL has chosen a dual AMD Opteron™ processor solution. With RDMA and transport offload handled in hardware, InfiniBand provides a highly efficient connection between AMD Opteron processor-based servers for storage and inter-processor communication to optimize performance in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and enterprise data center applications.
"As the need for simultaneous 32- and 64-bit computing continues to increase, the IWILL server solution with InfiniBand perfectly balances our AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture," said Ben Williams, vice president of AMD's Enterprise and Server/Workstation Business Segment. "A high performance cluster based on InfiniBand interconnects and powered by the superior performance of the AMD Opteron processor is allowing customers to migrate away from traditional proprietary supercomputers."
InfiniBand, Always a Generation Ahead
All major server vendors are delivering InfiniBand products and the OpenIB organization (www.openib.org) is driving an industry standard InfiniBand software stack. Furthermore, new and innovative InfiniBand hardware solutions such as IWILL's InfiniBand LOM server are being announced. All of these developments illustrate the broad market demand for InfiniBand-based solutions.
The InfiniBand specification already supports up to 30Gb/s, and the InfiniBand Trade Association (www.infinibandta.org) is developing support for bandwidths in excess of 100Gb/s per port. As the leading supplier of silicon products for InfiniBand technology, Mellanox is executing on a product roadmap that delivers both industry leading performance as well as unsurpassed value for compute server and storage connectivity.
"IWILL's InfiniBand server platform highlights the mass market momentum and the advantage InfiniBand has over all other high-speed technologies," said Eyal Waldman, CEO of Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox continues to drive InfiniBand as the most affordable 10 Gigabit per second technology and will deliver solutions that enable our customers with HCA add-in cards for less than $250 and LOM designs for less than $100 in the early 2005 timeframe. Offering performance advantages, wide ranging application support, broad industry-support, and a compelling roadmap makes InfiniBand an easy choice for clustering, enterprise, and storage applications."