BEAVERTON, Ore., Nov. 21, 2017 — The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, today highlighted the latest TOP500 List, which reports the world’s first and fourth fastest supercomputers are accelerated by InfiniBand. The results also show that InfiniBand continues to be the most used high-speed interconnect on the TOP500 List, reinforcing its status as the industry’s leading high performance interconnect technology. The updated list reflects continued demand for InfiniBand’s unparalleled combination of network bandwidth, low latency, scalability and efficiency.

InfiniBand connects 77 percent of the new High Performance Computing (HPC) systems added since the June 2017 list, eclipsing the 55 percent gain from the previous six month period. This upward trend indicates increasing InfiniBand usage by HPC system architects designing new clusters to solve larger, more complex issues. Additionally, InfiniBand is the preferred fabric of the leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning systems currently featured on the list. As HPC demands continue to evolve, especially in the case of AI and Deep Learning applications, the industry can rely on InfiniBand to meet their rigorous network performance requirements and scalability needs.

The latest TOP500 List also featured positive developments for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology. All 23 systems running Ethernet at 25Gb/s or higher are RoCE capable. We expect the number of RoCE enabled systems on the TOP500 List to rise as more systems look to take advantage of advanced high-speed Ethernet interconnects for further performance and efficiency gains.

“InfiniBand being the preferred interconnect for new HPC systems shows the increasing demand for the performance it can deliver.  Its place at #1 and #4 are excellent examples of that performance,” said Bill Lee, IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chair. “Besides of delivering world-leading performance and scalability, InfiniBand guarantees backward and forward compatibility, ensuring users highest return on investment and future proofing their data centers.”

The TOP500 List (www.top500.org) is published twice per year and ranks the top supercomputers worldwide based on the LINPACK benchmark rating system, providing valuable statistics for tracking trends in system performance and architecture.

About the InfiniBand Trade Association

The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand and the RoCE specifications. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle and QLogic. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand and RoCE specifications. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand and RoCE from an industry perspective through online, marketing and public relations engagements, and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.

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Source: InfiniBand Trade Association