Voltaire, a provider of grid backbone solutions for data centers, announced that its unified fabric that is integrated into SGI Altix supercomputers has indirectly powered-up North German Supercomputing Alliance’s (HLRN) new HLRN-II supercomputer system. The supercomputer system installed at different locations is incorporated with identical SGI Altix supercomputers.

 

Voltaire’s unified fabric mainly features: infiniBand that functions as inter servers; local area network/Ethernet; and storage area networks. It mainly consists of switches, gateways and software that are leveraged by SGI Altix supercomputers and in turn these supercomputers have been utilized in HLRN-II supercomputer system, thereby making HLRN-II 13 times more powerful than HLRN’s previous supercomputing resource.  

 

For those who are new to infiniBand technology, it is a new server I/O (Input/Output) technology that improves the server’s interconnectivity with I/O devices and with each other. 

 

The North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) maintains and shares the new supercomputer system in two separate German cities, the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik in Berlin and the Regionales Rechenzentrum für Niedersachsen in Hannover. Both the system complexes are closely integrated and interconnected to create a unified overall system that shows one-system characteristic. Even though both the sites are located 155 miles apart, they can be combined to attack large-scale problems via a high-speed network. 

 

The HLRN-II installation features: a total of 5,824 Intel (News - Alert) Xeon processor cores and 15.8 Terabytes (TB) of main memory; twin SGI Altix ICE systems, integrated SGI Altix XE 1200 clusters connected by 4 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 switches and 6 Voltaire Grid Director 2004 switches; 1.15 Petabytes (PB) of SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 RAID arrays storage capacity; fully integrated infiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructure in the unified fabric, parallel file system, and cluster management and monitoring suite that are designed specifically for HLRN-II and implemented by SGI professional services. 

 

The Voltaire Grid Director 2012 switch offers 288 ports and Voltaire Grid Director 2004 switch offers 96 ports, both with 20 Gigabits/second InfiniBand bandwidth and very low latency. Eight of the switches in the system include a Voltaire 10 Gigabit Ethernet line board to seamlessly bridge the 10 Gigabit Ethernet link used for communication and data transfer between the sites in Berlin and Hannover.  

 

“The HLRN-II represents a tremendous advance for advanced research in northern Germany,” said Prof. Alexander Reinefeld at the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN), in a statement. “The InfiniBand fabric from Voltaire plays an important role in this supercomputer because it gives us leading-edge inter-processor and I/O performance and enables the system to scale.” 

 

“HLRN can look forward to important advancements in scientific and engineering research using the SGI system with a Voltaire unified fabric,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire, in a statement. “By selecting a unified fabric from Voltaire that leverages both 20 Gigabits/second InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a single switching platform, HLRN gains improved performance and efficiency for their new supercomputer.” 

 

HLRN-II supercomputer system will be utilized to solve problems, such as complex simulations and data-intensive processes in physics, materials research, computational fluid mechanics, astrophysics, chemistry, and earth sciences. 

 

Israel-based Voltaire designs and develops server and storage switching and as well as software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the data center. It leverages InfiniBand technology and incorporates director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software.  
 
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