Voltaire switches accelerate no. 1 supercomputer and 88 percent of the commercial sites using InfiniBand

HAMBURG, Germany, June 24 -- Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of scale-out datacenter fabrics, today announced that its switches now power more than 50 percent of the InfiniBand deployments -- more than double the share of any other InfiniBand systems vendor -- on the 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers released yesterday. InfiniBand is the only industry-standard clustered interconnect that continues to increase share on the TOP500 list with a 25 percent growth rate compared to June 2008.

Voltaire 20 and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches provide the high performance interconnect for both the world's top research institutions on the list, as well as for commercial and industrial customers who rely on HPC technologies to run their businesses. Voltaire switches accelerate the NNSA/Los Alamos' Roadrunner supercomputer, which maintained its position as the world's most powerful supercomputer with performance greater than a petaflop. In addition, Voltaire switches comprise the high-performance fabrics for 88 percent of the commercial sites that use InfiniBand.

"Voltaire has a strong track record in HPC for delivering outstanding performance for some of the world's largest supercomputers while simultaneously delivering vertically-focused solutions to help commercial businesses accelerate performance of their most critical applications," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing at Voltaire. "We are pleased to strengthen our leadership position on the TOP500 list with more deployments than any other InfiniBand switch vendor."

Voltaire switches were used in 36 percent of all of the Nehalem Intel Xeon Processor 5500-based sites and 50 percent of the Nehalem sites using InfiniBand. One of these sites is the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) (# 77 on the list) which uses Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and UFM software for their 700-node supercomputer. More information about the UFM installation at HLRS is available at http://www.hlrs.de/systems/platforms/nec-nehalem-cluster/ and www.voltaire.com/HLRS.

Voltaire Grid Director 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches enable customers to take advantage of the greater processing power provided by multi-core and multi-processor servers by eliminating network bottlenecks and optimizing I/O throughput. Voltaire began shipping 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches in December 2008 and this week announced the general availability of the Grid Director 4700, a 648-port 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch.

The closely watched TOP500 list, issued twice a year on www.TOP500.org, ranks the most powerful supercomputers worldwide and serves as a valuable tool for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures. The latest list reflects changes from November 2008 to June 2009.

About Voltaire

Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) is a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for datacenters, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire's family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption. Used by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 and other premier organizations across many industries, including many of the TOP500 supercomputers, Voltaire products are included in server and blade offerings from Bull, HP, IBM, NEC, Rackable, SGI and Sun and provide the internal server-to-storage connectivity for the HP-Oracle Database Machine. Founded in 1997, Voltaire is headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel, and Billerica, Mass. More information is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

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Source: Voltaire, Ltd.