Voltaire InfiniBand switches accelerate performance of Dawning 5000A, ranked No. 1 HPC system in China

AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 18 -- SC08 -- Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of grid backbone solutions for datacenters, today announced that its Grid Director 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel gateways are providing the high-performance, low latency server and storage fabric for the Dawning 5000A system, the world's largest supercomputer based on Windows HPC Server 2008. Sponsored by the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, the Dawning 5000A system ranked No. 10 on the new TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers released this week and is also China's most powerful supercomputer.

Achieving a peak performance of 180.6 teraflops or 180.6 trillion calculations per second, the Dawning 5000A system consists of Dawning blade servers based on 6600 quad core AMD Opteron processors running Windows HPC Server 2008. The system is interconnected with 10 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 switches, each with 288 ports of 20 Gb/s InfiniBand and uses 36 Voltaire SR4G High Performance Storage Routers with FalconStor software for high performance connectivity between the InfiniBand fabric and Fibre Channel storage. The Voltaire SR4G improves the performance of applications accessing Fibre Channel storage by up to 200 percent and simplifies connectivity of InfiniBand fabrics to existing Storage Area Networks (SANs).

"The Dawning 5000A supercomputer with Voltaire InfiniBand delivers the ultra high performance server and storage connectivity needed to accelerate applications used on the system," said Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning Information Industry Co., Ltd. "With the help of Voltaire we were able to build China's most powerful supercomputer to further important research initiatives in the areas of commercial and research applications, including, earthquake prediction, weather forecasting, genomics, and stock trading analysis."

"The Dawning 5000A represents a major achievement for Windows-based HPC and is a clear example of the application performance benefits that can be attained by using InfiniBand in Windows datacenters," said Ryan Waite, product unit manager of the Windows HPC Server division at Microsoft.

"Voltaire solutions are widely-proven in HPC to accelerate the performance of applications in large, clustered environments," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances at Voltaire. "Voltaire switches and gateways deliver unparalleled performance for both the server and storage connectivity in the Dawning 5000A system. We're pleased to have been chosen by Dawning Information Industry to enable China's fastest and most powerful supercomputer."

About Dawning Information Industry Co.

Dawning Information Industry Co., Ltd, was founded in June 1995 as a high-tech enterprise, whose establishment was under the great promotion of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Information Industry and the CAS on the basis of the achievements of national "863" program. It relies on the technology support from the Institute of Computing Technology of CAS, the National Research Center for Intelligent Computing System and the National High Performance Computing Center and has a strong technical strength. The launch of the Dawning series products has made an indelible contribution to promoting the development of China's high performance computers.

Dawning's high-performance computer has been listed as No. 1 in the high performance computer market for 11 consecutive years, owning more than a 70 percent share among the domestic high performance computer market. Featuring cutting edge technologies, high performance and superior service, Dawning servers have been awarded "National Scientific and Technological Progress Prize First Class and Second Class," "Scientific innovation special award of CAS," and "China's top 10 scientific and technological progresses in 2001, 2003 and 2004." Dawning has always focused on servers' R&D and applications backed by a solid technical foundation in supercomputing and in-house intellectual property. With continuous innovation, Dawning built a full-line high-quality servers with independent intellectual property rights to meet all kinds of diversified requirements for supercomputers or common PC servers. They are widely deployed in the systems of governments, education, finance, telecommunications, biology, meteorology, petroleum, and other industries.

About Voltaire

Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) designs and develops server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the datacenter. Voltaire refers to its server and storage switching and software solutions as the Voltaire Grid Backbone. Voltaire's products leverage InfiniBand technology and include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software. Voltaire's solutions have been sold to a wide range of end customers including governmental, research and educational organizations, as well as market-leading enterprises in the manufacturing, oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries. Founded in 1997, Voltaire Ltd. is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, and has its U.S. headquarters in Billerica, Mass. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

-----

Source: Voltaire Ltd.