SCIENCE

Voltaire has announced that the company's Vantage 8500 10GbE switch enabled 3X faster job runtime for OpenFOAM according to a benchmark test conducted by Voltaire. The tests compared Voltaire 10GbE to a configuration based on 1GbE.

The results were achieved on a cluster of 12 nodes, simulating a real-world commercial HPC environment where multiple application jobs run simultaneously on a large cluster. The Vantage 8500 delivered improved performance for a variety of jobs running concurrently on 4 to 12 nodes, underscoring the switch's ability to improve performance of multiple applications running on a single cluster.

"A 3X improvement in job runtime is significant to customers in manufacturing or any industry," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "This benchmark proves that environments that traditionally use 1GbE can gain significant performance improvements by migrating to 10GbE. Moreover, the economics are becoming increasingly more attractive as the availability of 10GbE LAN on Motherboard (LOM) dramatically reduces overall networking costs."

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 switch is a modular, high-performance, high-density Layer-2 core 10GbE switch, optimized for HPC, enterprise data center and cloud computing environments. Supporting a horizontally scaling architecture, multiple Vantage 8500 switches can be managed as a single core switch supporting non-blocking 10GbE connectivity for up to 3400 servers.

The benchmark configuration consisted of OpenFOAM simpleFoam.KR running on twelve, 8-core Intel Xeon X5550 servers connected by the Voltaire Vantage 8500 10GbE switch. Using this configuration, the time needed for computational simulation was reduced from 24 hours to 8 hours, as compared to the 1GbE configuration.