Bringing New Levels of Performance to High Performance Clusters

Higher educational institutions and research labs have a need to run applications as fast as possible, and be able to run complex computational analysis quickly in order to make important advancements in research and scientific discovery. To dramatically improve the speed of data across and within server clusters and storage systems, higher educational institutions and research labs are turning to Voltaire's InfiniBand-based Grid Backbone™ solutions.

The Voltaire Solution

Voltaire solutions for education and research offer many compelling benefits:

• High Bandwidth For Faster Product Development and Problem Solving
  Voltaire solutions provide bandwidth of 10-30 Gbps to allow for faster and more frequent analysis by commercially available or home-grown applications.
  
• Lower Latency To Accelerate Application Runtime
  Voltaire solutions provide latency as low as 1.3 microseconds to accelerate the runtime of applications so problems and jobs are completed quickly.
  
• Standards-Based and Flexible
  Voltaire solutions are based on InfiniBand: the only industry-standard, high-performance interconnect. Voltaire solutions can be built as fully non-blocking 20 Gbps, or as a lower-bandwidth fabric based on the needs of the applications. This is particularly important to organizations running compute jobs in an environment that uses multiple commercial or home grown applications.
  
• Fast I/O for Storage
  Voltaire solutions enable parallel file systems over InfiniBand, which offers far-greater performance and scalability than NFS solutions. Running scalable file systems over Voltaire Grid Backbone switching solutions creates the most scalable solution in the industry -- with more than 1000 nodes on a single name space -- and delivers high performance connectivity for the storage and client nodes.
  
• Scalable Solution
  Voltaire solutions support clusters ranging from a few to thousands of nodes.
  

Mid-Sized Clusters & Grids

For clusters ranging from 25-96 compute nodes, Voltaire offers the Grid Director™ ISR 9096 multi-service switch -- the industry's highest performing multi-service switch for medium-to-large clusters and grids. The switch enables high performance non-blocking configurations and features an enterprise-level, high availability design. The Grid Director ISR 9096 supports up to 96 InfiniBand 4X (20 Gbps) ports (or 10 Gbps with SDR) and is scalable through the use of additional, hot-swappable modules. The Grid Director ISR 9096 also features GbE and Fibre Channel ports so the solution can provide high-performance, integrated SAN and LAN connectivity.

Large Clusters and Grids

For very large clusters and grids, Voltaire offers the Grid Director™ ISR 9288, a larger version of the Grid Director ISR 9096. The Grid Director ISR 9288 features integrated InfiniBand storage and LAN connectivity, and it supports up to 288 InfiniBand 4X (20 Gbps) ports or 10 Gbps with SDR or 96 InfiniBand 12X (30 Gbps) ports.