Voltaire® Grid Director™ 4036

Scaling-Out Data Centers with QDR

The Voltaire Grid Director 4036 is a high performance, low latency and fully non-blocking InfiniBand switch for high performance clusters. Delivering 2.88 Tbps of non-blocking bandwidth with 100 nanoseconds of latency (port-to-port), I/O bottlenecks are removed making applications operate at maximum efficiency. The efficient Grid Director 4036's smart design makes it easy to build clusters that can scale-out to thousands of nodes.

Faster servers combined with high performance storage and applications that use increasingly complex models are causing data bandwidth requirements to spiral upward.  As servers are deployed with next generation processors and server busses, high-performance computing environments - in industries such as energy, bioscience, financial services, government and academic research - will need every last bit of bandwidth delivered with Voltaire’s fourth generation Grid Director 4036 smart switches.

Use Smart Switches to Create Smart Clusters

Voltaire’s fourth generation InfiniBand switches add many new smart capabilities to meet the need of next generation data centers.

• Smart device management provides a simple interface for deploying, troubleshooting, maintaining and upgrading the switch.
• A smart switch design leverages advances in cabling technology in concert with the Grid Director 4036’s advanced port and signal optimization capabilities, which allows users to determine the optimal settings for the connected QSFP cable.  This results in more flexibility in the selection of cables and provides for simpler and faster cluster deployments without errors caused by degraded signal integrity.
• An onboard subnet manager enables simple, out-of-the-box fabric bring-up for small to medium clusters. The Grid Director 4036 can also be coupled with Voltaire's Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™), which automatically discovers, virtualizes, monitors, and optimizes the fabric infrastructure and accelerates the active applications.
• Advanced congestion management capabilities enable users to detect congestion with advanced multi-path and adaptive routing capabilities and prevent degraded application performance.

Building Efficient Clusters & Grids

The Voltaire Grid Director 4036 is the industry’s most cost-effective building block for deploying high performance clusters and data centers. Whether looking at price-to-performance or energy-to-performance, the Grid Director 4036 reaches new levels of achievement.

Voltaire's InfiniBand solutions have been at the top of both the Top500 (top500.org) list of fastest supercomputers in the world and the Green500 (green500.org) list of "greenest" supercomputers for years, indicating recognized leadership in both performance and efficiency. The design of the Grid Director 4036 ensures that this leadership will be maintained in the QDR era.

Also available is the Grid Director 2036, which provides 36 DDR (20Gbps) ports in a 1U switch with up to 1.44 Tbps of available bandwidth.