Research & Education Cluster Computing Solutions

Voltaire Brings New Levels of Performance to Cluster Computing

Higher educational institutions and research labs are turning to Voltaire’s Infiniband cluster computing solutions. Due to their need to run applications and complex computational analysis as fast as possible, many institutions have tested and found that Voltaire’s Infiniband computer clustering solutions allow them to achieve the speed needed for their complex calculations.

The Voltaire Solution for Cluster Computing

Voltaire solutions for education and research offer many compelling benefits:

• High Bandwidth For Faster Product Development and Problem Solving
  Voltaire InfiniBand cluster computing solutions provide bandwidth of 10-30 Gb/s 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 InfiniBand solutions can be built as fully non-blocking 20 Gb/s, 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 cluster computing solutions enable parallel file systems over InfiniBand, which offers far-greater performance and scalability than NFS solutions. Running scalable file systems over Voltaire 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.

Small to Mid-Sized Clusters

For small-to-medium sized clusters, Voltaire offers the Voltaire Grid Director™ 9024. It is a 1U device with twenty-four 20 Gbps (DDR) InfiniBand ports. The switch is a high performance, low latency, fully non-blocking edge or leaf-switch with a throughput of 480 Gb/s.

It is well-suited for small InfiniBand fabrics with up to 24 nodes because it includes all of the necessary management capabilities to function as a stand-alone switch. The Grid Director 9024 is internally managed and offers comprehensive device and fabric management capabilities. Designed for high-availability (high MBTF) and easy maintenance, the switch is simple to install and features straightforward initialization.  The solution is scalable as additional switches can be added to support additional nodes.

Large Clusters

For larger clusters ranging from 25–96 compute nodes, Voltaire offers the Grid Director™ 2004 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 2004 supports up to 96 InfiniBand 4X ports (20 Gb/s) and is scalable through the use of additional, hot-swappable modules. The Grid Director 2004 also features 10 GbE and Fibre Channel ports so the solution can provide high-performance, integrated SAN and LAN connectivity.

For very large clusters and grids, Voltaire offers the Grid Director™ 2012, a larger version of the Grid Director 2004. The Grid Director 2012 features integrated storage and LAN connectivity, and it supports up to 288 InfiniBand 4X ports (20 Gb/s).

Voltaire Scale-out Fabrics and Intel® Cluster Computer Ready

As a member of the Intel® Cluster Ready program, Voltaire is making it easier to experience the power of high-performance computing (HPC) by helping to simplify the purchasing, deployment, and management of Intel® processor-based clusters.

Voltaire Scale-out Fabric products are Intel Cluster Ready Certified Components that allow customers to maximize the utilization of their Intel-based systems.

Follow our blog on Intel Cluster Ready solutions on the Cluster Connection site!