HPCwire: Analysts Boost InfiniBand Outlook

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

April 18, 2008

Analysts Boost InfiniBand Outlook

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Buoyed by the recent good news of IDC's upgraded forecast for InfiniBand (IB) adoption, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) has been trumpeting the fabric's growing prospects in both HPC and more traditional enterprise settings. With the OpenFabrics Alliance driving standardized software solutions for Linux and Windows and InfiniBand vendors coming to market with 40 Gbps switches and adapters, there's little doubt that the fabric has the potential to go mainstream. All the interested parties have been working hard to make that happen.

Most of the impediments to InfiniBand are outside of the technology itself. The latest 40 Gbps (QDR) InfiniBand technology would not be practical without the new PCI Express 2.0 chipsets that are just now going mainstream. Optical or active copper cables will also be required in applications that need larger clusters or better signal integrity. These cable products are just coming into the market now, but the lower volumes needed for InfiniBand deployments will tend to keep prices high.

Despite that, InfiniBand's prospects look bright. Based on better than expected 2007 shipments of DDR switches and adapters, IDC has cranked up its InfiniBand forecast for 2008, placing it on a steeper growth curve than the previous May 2007 forecast. Last year the expectation was that DDR would not overtake SDR until 2008. But that crossover has already occurred. Based on the new data, the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) forecast for HCA revenue went from 29 percent to 35 percent ($279.7 million by 2011) and the CAGR forecast for switch revenue increased from 45 percent to 47.1 percent ($656.3 million by 2011).

Though the numbers were bumped only modestly, the trend is telling. Behind the vendors, analysts are often the second line of cheerleaders for the market. In this case, they were uncharacteristicly conservative.

Perhaps the most interesting development for InfiniBand is the interest the technology has drawn from outside the HPC base. The desire for real-time transactions with terabyte-sized databases is putting a strain on existing networks. Mainstream enterprise applications in areas such as eCommerce, financial services, health services, retail, supply chain management and Web services represent a greenfield market for InfiniBand.

Two of the biggest technology drivers are multicore processors and virtualization, both of which increase demands on I/O performance. As platforms become denser, the advantages of consolidating I/O onto a single, high-bandwidth wire become more attractive. IDC is predicting InfiniBand will represent more than 10 percent of switch revenue by 2011.

In the past six to nine months, InfiniBand has started to penetrate the enterprise datacenter in earnest. Some Oracle RAC and IBM DB2 setups are now using IB connectivity, and Mellanox says there are more than 30 proof-of-concept deployments for VMware on top of InfiniBand.

Alexa Internet, an Amazon subsidiary, deployed InfiniBand to power its search engine. Using the NFS over RDMA (NFSoRDMA) protocol to crawl its 240 terabytes of Web data, Alexa was able to run its data mining application at 1/5 the cost of an equivalent 10GbE-connected storage setup. NFSoRDMA is a high-level protocol that bypasses the TCP/IP network baggage and takes advantage of InfiniBand's inherently high bandwidth and low latency. With NFSoRDMA being accepted in mainline Linux kernels later this year, InfiniBand-connected storage should become increasingly attractive.

Enterprise storage, in general, is one area where InfiniBand seems poised for big growth. The Taneja Group, a consistent proponent of the technology, recently released its forecast for native InfiniBand storage in the datacenter. Based on its surveys of vendors like DataDirect Networks, Engenio, Xiranet, Terrascale and IBRIX, over the last three years, they've seen a growth rate for native InfiniBand storage of 60-70 percent. They expect that level of growth to continue as the demand for compute and I/O intensive applications continues to increase and the datacenter becomes more consolidated through virtualization. The better scalability of IB fabrics will attract large-scale storage deployments, but even more modest installations can take advantage of the better performance.

According the Taneja report, "Today, storage and server administrators in even run of the mill enterprises are more often than not facing HPC-like computing needs, or will be facing one in the near future. In our view, once a system approaches 16 nodes and requires substantial I/O, connections to communication and storage fabrics make traditional connectivity impractical."

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html