17 November 2014

Mellanox's EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand solutions chosen for CORAL supercomputer project

Mellanox Technologies Ltd of Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Yokneam, Israel, a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for data-center servers and storage systems, says that its EDR 100Gb/s solutions have been selected as key components of new supercomputers at two of the USA’s premier national labs – Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

The hybrid supercomputer design will interconnect thousands of compute nodes containing both IBM POWER CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs via Mellanox’s EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand-based solutions, providing what is claimed to be one of the most advanced architectures of its kind for high-performance computing applications.

CORAL (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore National Labs) is a project that was launched in 2013 to develop the technology and meet the Department of Energy’s 2017-2018 leadership computing needs with supercomputers. The collaboration between Mellanox, IBM and NVIDIA was selected by the CORAL project team after a comprehensive evaluation of future technologies from a variety of vendors. The development of these supercomputers is well underway, with installation expected in 2017.

“The new embedded capabilities will significantly enhance the ability of applications to effectively communicate latency-sensitive data,” says Jim Rogers, director of operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL. “The net result will be a well-balanced system that can dramatically improve performance for DOE’s mission-critical applications,” he adds.

“Simulations of the safety and reliability of elements of the American nuclear deterrent require arguably the most complex and sophisticated 3D applications on the planet,” says Michel McCoy, head of Livermore’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “These require the full capability of machines of this magnitude and, for these systems to effectively run these codes, extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth communication across the platform is essential,” he adds.

“Organizations and research facilities are required to process and analyze more information than ever before and to do it in less time,” comments Mellanox’s chief technology officer Michael Kagan. “Mellanox interconnect solutions deliver the highest performance and scalability, and provide the most advanced roadmap that paves the road to Exascale computing,” he claims.

Tags: Mellanox

Visit: www.ornl.gov

Visit: www.llnl.gov

Visit: www.mellanox.com/page/switch_systems_overview