IBM and Voltaire
Over the past five years, IBM has been selling and supporting Voltaire products as part of their IBM blade, iDataPlex and rack-based clustering solutions to provide an extremely effective platform for applications demanding high bandwidth and low latency across multiple vertical markets. As a result, Voltaire has the largest installed base of InfiniBand switches in IBM High Performance solutions worldwide and has established itself as a strategic provider of Industry Standard High Performance Interconnect Solutions within IBM.
Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) is a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire’s family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption. Voltaire products are used by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 and other premier organizations across many industries, including many of the TOP500 supercomputers.
The partnership offers end users pre-certified solutions based on the comprehensive testing IBM performs on Voltaire’s extensive product suite. This certification process completed by IBM ensures that Voltaire-based products are tested, certified and supported by IBM to be compatible with a broad range of IBM servers, storage and software, including, but not limited to, iDataPlex, BladeCenter & Rack based servers,General Parallel File System Software and Cluster Systems Management Software. In addition, Voltaire’s solutions have achieved a broad range of IBM Certifications including IBM Server Proven, member of IBM BladeCenter Interoperability Program, IBM Storage Proven, Ready for IBM Grid Computing, Ready for IBM Tivoli Software and Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator certification.
Success in the Field
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) needed to replace two existing supercomputing clusters. The organization wanted to create a scalable and modular cluster that would enable expansion at known price-points, and it planned to use the same architecture to support Magellan, an HPC-in-the-cloud project run jointly with the Argonne National Laboratories.
The new cluster, named Carver in honor of George Washington Carver, an American scientist, botanist, educator and inventor, comprises 400 iDataPlex servers. Each iDataPlex has two quad-core Intel Xeon X5600 processors running Linux, for a total of 3,200 cores, and the theoretical peak performance is 34.2 TFlop/s. The Voltaire Grid Director 4700 QDR InfiniBand switches are arranged in a HyperScale configuration, which enables high scalability with linear performance, and allowed NERSC to deploy a 1,200 node InfiniBand interconnect using only two racks. The switches provide 40 Gb/s of point-to-point bandwidth for high-performance message passing and access to the global file system.
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Voltaire Scale-out InfiniBand
InfiniBand is a high performance, switched fabric interconnect standard for servers. The technology is widely deployed worldwide in server clusters ranging from two to thousands of nodes. InfiniBand has become the standard interconnect of choice for high performance computing (HPC) environments and is becoming the preferred standard in enterprise data centers requiring a high performance fabric.
Today, many high performance data centers take advantage of InfiniBand-based interconnect support incorporated into leading ISV applications and MPI-based applications. Voltaire InfiniBand interconnects eliminate I/O bottlenecks, allowing these HPC applications to run faster and more efficiently.
Voltaire Scale-out Ethernet
Voltaire’s scale-out 10Gb Ethernet offerings enable users to benefit from a far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric with lower overall fabric costs and power consumption, greater efficiencies, and simplified management than traditional 10 Gb Ethernet fabrics.
Instead of using many hierarchical switching tiers that are constrained by the performance of its root, the Voltaire approach allows greater scalability while guaranteeing higher performance, simpler management, and lower costs. For a customer building a 1000 node data center, this approach delivers 10X lower latency and 4X faster core performance for half the price, using 3X less power than alternative solutions.
Delivering Scale-Out Data Center Fabrics
Voltaire delivers scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire’s family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption.
Voltaire allows customers to choose the fabric that is right for them – InfiniBand or 10 Gigabit Ethernet – based on their application requirements and individual technology practices, without sacrificing scalability and performance.
Voltaire provides high-performance InfiniBand connectivity and microsecond latencies to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources. Applications can gain up to a 300% performance improvement using Voltaire switches as the cluster interconnect instead of Ethernet. Moreover, the switches' power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings.
Voltaire OFED Support
Voltaire offers an easily installable binary form of the Open Fabric Alliance’s Open Fabric Enterprise Distribution (OFED) along with the most recently available fixes and patches that have been discovered during the Voltaire testing and certification process. All such fixes and enhancements to OFED are continually contributed back to the OpenFabrics developer community so they may be used in future versions of OFED.
Supported OFED software components include:
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Voltaire Messaging Accelerator™ (VMA™) Software
Voltaire Messaging Accelerator™ is a software solution that dramatically improves performance of multi-cast applications running on InfiniBand fabrics. Voltaire Messaging Accelerator boosts performance for message based applications such as those found in financial service environments that use Wombat and Reuters RMDS. The result is a reduction in latency by as much as 50% and an increase in application throughput per server as compared to applications running on standard Ethernet interconnect networks.
Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) Software
Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) is a powerful platform for managing demanding scale-out computing environments. Now data center operators can efficiently monitor and operate the entire fabric, increase application performance and maximize fabric resource utilization.
UFM uses an innovative application-centric approach to bridge the gap between servers, applications and fabric elements. UFM's revolutionary fabric model allows users to manage fabrics as a set of business related entities such as time critical applications or services. UFM’s management infrastructure enables fabric monitoring and performance optimization on the application-logical level rather than just at the individual port or device level.
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