HPCwire: Appro Doubles Up on Onboard InfiniBand

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

HPCwire >> Features

June 18, 2009

Appro Doubles Up on Onboard InfiniBand

by John E. West, for HPCwire

On Tuesday Appro announced the latest update to its Xtreme-X1 line of supercomputers. The new X1 has the Nehalem EPs of course (Xeon 5500s), but one of the significant innovations was the use of dual quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand chips on the motherboard to create two InfiniBand networks (or "rails") in the system.

With single data rate and double data rate (DDR) InfiniBand, it was possible to use a single InfiniBand host channel adapter (HCA) -- or a single chip with multiple ports -- connected to a single PCI Express bus and not swamp the bandwidth of the PCI Express link. Appro has offered multi-rail clusters in the past, configured in a variety of ways, including using multiple HCAs, a single IB chip and PCI Express channel combination directly on the motherboard with a separate IB link via an HCA card and, most recently, a single Mellanox ConnectX chip on the motherboard with two DDR ports on a single PCI Express link.

With this latest product announcement, however, Appro moves to two QDR Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand chips directly mounted on the motherboard, each connected to the node via its own x8 PCI Express v2.0 channel. The custom motherboards Appro is using for this application (built by a "large contract manufacturer in Asia," who the company wasn't interested in naming) also provide another x8 PCI Express v2.0 channel for whatever additional capability a specific cluster might require; Fibre Channel storage, for example, or a 10 Gbps Ethernet network.

For a while this week Appro had the only product on the market with dual QDR IB chips mounted on the motherboard with their own PCI Express channels. Then Bull announced its bullx family of HPC servers based on a new blade architecture in which a single node supports two x16 and two x8 PCI Express interfaces, enabling the node to support both the dual QDR IB chips on the motherboard and dual on-board GPUs.

Why directly mount the InfiniBand silicon to the motherboards? After all, since they are still using the PCI Express interface, why not just plug in HCAs and avoid the added engineering? John Lee, vice president of Appro's Advanced Technology Solutions Group, says that, while performance is "just about the same" in either the on-board or HCA-based implementations, reliability and density in very large clusters improves with fewer physical connectors. Also, cost is a driving factor. Lee indicates that there is a "20-30% savings" from using ConnectX chips directly on the motherboard versus buying InfiniBand ports on HCAs. In a very large cluster -- the kind that Appro has been building recently for DoE and the University of Tsukuba in Japan -- that cost savings can really add up.

One can draw a line from the idea that buying the ConnectX chips and directly mounting them on the motherboards saves money to a future revenue problem for Mellanox's HCA business. Of course, they make the silicon, too, so they are in the deal either way, but profits are probably lower for the chip. Appro and Bull aren't the only ones to have done the math on this, and many motherboard manufacturers have been directly mounting IB silicon on their motherboards for some time now. This probably helps to explain Mellanox's recent moves to diversify its revenue, for example moving into 10 Gb Ethernet, InfiniBand switches and multi-protocol gateways.

It is interesting to see two vendors launch dual-rail QDR InfiniBand cluster architectures at the same time, both using InfiniBand chips mounted directly on the motherboards rather than via HCAs. Appro's Lee explained in an interview with HPCwire that while "there is not a lot of leadership in multi-rail adoption right now" they expect to see increasing customer uptake in the market for multi-rail clusters in late 2009 and 2010. Although the idea itself is not new, the increasing socket count in clusters will drive growth in the amount of data that needs to be moved around a cluster at a faster rate than the InfiniBand roadmap will increase bandwidth.

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

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. 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