The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
September 09, 2008
InfiniBand was once billed as the foundational, system-wide interconnect to unify all of enterprise networking. While that didn't happen, the protocol is playing an increasingly important role in the datacenter. With the steady adoption of more powerful business-continuity, disaster recovery and grid computing applications, many enterprises are turning to InfiniBand as the enabler of their most latency-intolerant, bandwidth-intensive applications across Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks.
Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, distinguished engineer of the IBM System and Technology Group, and Todd Bundy, director with ADVA Optical Networking, are longtime shapers and observers of enterprise datacenter networking. In this conversation, they offer their thoughts on InfiniBand's place in the enterprise datacenter moving forward. Can InfiniBand co-exist with emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? What strategic factors must enterprise datacenter managers weigh in ensuring that today's and tomorrow's needs are cost-effectively met?
HPCwire: What are the most important business drivers and trends that enterprise datacenter managers are negotiating today?
Dr. Casimer DeCusatis: First, the pace of innovation is accelerating. When you consider that it took close to a century for absolutely world-changing technologies like the automobile and telephone to reach 50-percent market adoption, it's just astounding to see what has happened and what is happening with the Internet, mobile, wireless, storage, etc. These advancements in technology are enabling business transformation -- look, as an example, at how advancements in storage technologies have fueled revolutionary capabilities in medical and financial networking. And the business innovations push back to drive continued technology advancement. It's a cycle.
So, that accelerating pace of innovation obviously has tremendous impact on the enterprise datacenter. In addition, there's the ongoing emphasis on network convergence, for the sake of simplicity and cost efficiency. Plus, there are interesting new datacenter architectures coming out that demand evaluation.
Those are the converging forces at a broad level, and they have come together to drive the most prevalent contemporary vision for the new enterprise datacenter -- an evolutionary model that provides for efficient IT service delivery today and seamlessly accommodates change for tomorrow.
HPCwire: What are the technology underpinnings of that vision?
Todd Bundy: There are some basic requirements that enterprise datacenters share, though in varying degrees of importance depending on the business objectives that a particular datacenter is striving to meet. These requirements include unified fabric infrastructure, high bandwidth, low latency, unified cloud management, connectivity over extended distances, security, resiliency, energy efficiency, open standards for multi-vendor interoperability, etc. We can see that the world wants to eventually get to an end state of global networking with zero downtime. But in the evolution from here to there, there will be a lot of different needs among enterprises -- and even a lot of different needs among applications and services run by a given enterprise.
HPCwire: Where does InfiniBand fit into this story?
Bundy: InfiniBand developed out of precisely this type of conversation, and it was envisioned as the powerful, unifying interconnect fabric for business networking.
Page: 1 of 5(Digg, Technorati, more)
PGI Accelerator™ Fortran 95/03 and C99 compilers for x64+NVIDIA
Accelerate applications on x64+GPU platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing Fortran and C programs. Available now for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Download a free 15 day trial.
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager integrates all the cluster productivity tools you need to deploy, run and manage your HPC environment.
Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...
Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...
Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...
Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...
Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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