News

posted on 09 June 2008 15:37

Mellanox has made its 36-port, 40Gbit/s InfiniBand InifiniScale IV switch silicon available.

OEMS such as HP, Intel and Sun will be able to build faster InfiniBand switches with four times more throughput than 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel and six times the switching and data capacity of a 24-port 10GigE device.

Product reference platforms are available and 40Gig InfiniBand will be demonstrated at the International Supercomputing Conference.

IDC estimates that there is a CAGR of 54.5% for InfiniBand ports over 2006 to 2011.

InfiniBand is faster than both Ethernet and Fibre Channel.  Eyal Waldman, chairman, president, and CEO of Mellanox , said: “InfiniScale IV-based switch systems and ConnectX adapters will provide the fabric for a number of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and optimize multi-core CPU performance of enterprise and high-performance computing applications including database, design automation, financial services, grids, health services, media creation, oil and gas, virtualization, weather analysis, web services, and more.”

There is a prospect that InfiniBand will become more widely used in enterprise data centres because it can offer fabric convergence now whereas convergence of data centre switching onto Ethernet depends upon a new grade of Ethernet that is lossless and has predictable quality of service.

For example, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) depends upon this.

InfiniScale IV integrates traffic management capabilities including congestion control, adaptive routing, multiple subnet support, and port monitoring and mirroring. Switch product development platforms are available today from Mellanox for benchmarking and accelerating time to market for OEM systems.

These 40Gb/s, 36-port, rack mountable systems are available with either microGiGaCN or QSFP connectors compatible with passive and active copper cables and active fiber cabling solutions. Production switch systems based on the InfiniScale IV are expected to be available later in 2008 from leading server and infrastructure system OEMs.

For example, Bjorn Andersson, director HPC technologies for Sun Microsystems, said: “High-performance computing is constantly finding new applications in both science and industry, fostering new demands for I/O performance. The combination of Sun's innovative blade server, software, storage and switch system technology and Mellanox’s leading 40Gb/s InfiniBand switch silicon delivers outstanding computing performance that addresses a new era of Petascale computing needs.”

Sun has already talked of a new and higher performance InfiniBand switching product coming.

Other Mellanox partners include Appro, Bull, Microsoft, Supermicro, TYAN (MiTAC), and Voltaire.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}