InfiniBand Products
Voltaire Scale-Out InfiniBand
What is 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.
InfiniBand’s industry-standard ecosystem creates cost-effective hardware and software solutions that easily scale from generation to generation. With the largest installed base of 10, 20, and 40 Gb/s ports in the market, InfiniBand is delivering real-world benefits in data centers, high-performance clusters, storage devices, and embedded applications.
| 1 Gb Ethernet | Traditional 10 Gb Ethernet |
Myrinet | InfiniBand | |
| Bandwidth | 1 Gb/sec | 10 Gb/sec | 10 Gb/sec | 10, 20 & 40 Gb/sec |
| Latency | ~10 us | 2.5 - 5.5 us | < 2 us | |
| Average Efficiency | 53% | No Entries | 68% | 74% |
Price/performance advantages for InfiniBand
For end users with less rigid performance requirements than those addressed by InfiniBand, Voltaire is introducing scale-out 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions that provide a far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric than traditional 10GbE solutions.
Scaling Out Data Center Fabrics with Voltaire InfiniBand
As data centers grow in size and capacity, there is a need to re-think the way we connect server, storage, and external resources in the data center. Rather than building an expensive, hierarchical network that can’t scale, networks should be built as scale-out fabrics. In a scale-out design, multiple industry-standard elements are stacked and coupled using clustering software that forms a unified system view.
Voltaire InfiniBand was designed as a scale-out data center fabric with a very lightweight switching infrastructure, the ability to run mesh topologies and multiple paths, and with fabric and I/O partitioning capabilities and central discovery and policy management. Voltaire InfiniBand solutions allow horizontal scalability without performance degradation, while maintaining a linear cost model.
Accelerating Application Performance with Voltaire InfiniBand
With up to 40Gb/s bandwidth and latencies of less than 100 nanoseconds, Voltaire’s family of InfiniBand switches and powerful fabric management software deliver solutions that result in improved performance, utilization and scalability for customers in HPC, manufacturing, energy, financial services, media, life sciences and other compute-intensive applications. The result is a proven competitive advantage through the elimination of server I/O bottlenecks and reduced complexity with seamless connectivity between InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based networks.
In addition to offering InfiniBand switch-technology, Voltaire works directly with software-vendors to create the most efficient, fastest, and lowest-latency solutions available. By leveraging Voltaire InfiniBand-based solutions, organizations can now speed application performance to analyze products faster and more efficiently.
Benchmark testing has found that Voltaire interconnect solutions reduce application runtime by as much as 50 to 300 percent.
By using Voltaire’s Open MPI Accelerator™ (OMA™), an additional 25% reduction in runtime can be seen, over and above the already 50-300% improvement that that Voltaire interconnect solutions show in reducing application runtime.