Grid Computing and Grid Technology
At the beginning of the century, vast computer networks were being connected over the Internet, creating massive amounts of CPU power. Experts predicted that this grid technology would become available to the man on the street as grid computing evolved into CPU sharing on the Internet. They were not far wrong—however they did not take into account usability and privacy issues that would delay their predictions. The use of grid computing or grid technologies is currently limited to larger institutions for scientific purposes and producers of high performance computers (also known as HPCs or supercomputers).
Grid computing is quickly taking hold as the architecture of choice for computing in the next generation data center. Also referred to as utility computing or on-demand computing, all of these architectures share a common vision. In this design, pools of servers, storage systems and networks are united into one large, virtual system that better addresses compute jobs by sharing the workload across many low-cost machines. This resource sharing provides more efficient use of the deployed infrastructure and allows for the provisioning of resources on-the-fly to enable utility or on-demand, computing.
Voltaire's multi-service Grid Director™ switches are a key enabler of grid computing because their design defines a network for interconnecting processing systems, storage I/O and network I/O into a single, easy-to-manage environment. In a grid environment, Voltaire switches accept policies or service requests and a virtual datacenter environment that consists of virtual servers, virtual networks, virtual storage and a virtual topology can be created on an as-needed basis.
Voltaire solutions for grid computing provide:
High Performance
Voltaire solutions deliver bandwidth of 10-30 Gbps, with low latency and low CPU overhead.
Standards-Based
Voltaire solutions work with industry standard hardware are based on standards-based technologies such as RDMA, SDP, DAPL and iSCSI to ensure easy integration with existing infrastructure.
Connectivity to legacy systems
Voltaire solutions provide seamless high performance connectivity to storage and IP networks removing the I/O bottleneck often associated with large clusters and grids.
Scalability
Through high capacity InfiniBand switching and advanced fabric management capabilities, Voltaire solutions enable grids to scale to the thousands and tens of thousands of nodes.
Server and Storage Virtualization
A key dependency for grid computing is the intelligence of the infrastructure to know where the available resources are and how to activate those resources: resource allocation, provisioning and virtualization. Voltaire solutions provide the intelligent underlying infrastructure that enables advanced management, traffic routing and virtualization.
