IBM GPFS over InfiniBand

IBM GPFS provides a scalable high-performance parallel file system for Linux® clusters. It is capable of supporting multi-terabytes of storage and over 1000 disks within a single file system. Moreover, as a shared-disk file system, IBM GPFS can provide every cluster node with concurrent read/write access to a single file.

The combination of IBM GPFS and Voltaire's InfiniBand-based Grid Backbone™ solutions delivers extremely high performance on both the clients and storage servers. Voltaire's director-class, multi-service switches offer integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fibre Channel connectivity in a single chassis. By enabling interprocessor communication and high performance storage on a single network, Voltaire solutions bring even greater performance and scalability to IBM GPFS.

Voltaire customer Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) deployed a 356-node IBM xSeries clustered supercomputer using Voltaire Grid Director™ multi-service switches and IBM GPFS to provide fast data access from all of the nodes in the cluster.


On-Demand Research Center at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

356 IBM eServer 326 712 Opteron CPUs 1.4 TB Memory Storage 11TB GPFS Over InfiniBand

Voltaire Grid Backbone 2 Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 switches Partially blocking - 1:1.7 Yet achieved 80% network efficiency Top500 Cluster (Nov. 2005) Rank #226, 3.4 TFlops