InfiniBand Continues Its Position as Preferred Top500 Supercomputing Interconnect

AUSTIN, Tex., Nov. 17 — The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) today highlighted the latest TOP500 list results, revealing 235 of the world’s supercomputers rely on its standard interconnect technology, up from 225 a year ago. This number represents 47 percent of the TOP500 list, ranking InfiniBand above Ethernet and proprietary solutions. The dominance of InfiniBand in the world’s most powerful supercomputers is due to the standard’s superior performance, efficiency and scalability.

InfiniBand connects 45 percent of the 73 most powerful Petascale systems. Additionally, almost half of the systems on the list are used for Research or in Academic institutions, industries that require high performance and high efficiency. InfiniBand’s high bandwidth, low latency and CPU offloads make it the preferred solution for these systems, accounting for 61 percent of the Research and 80 percent of the Academic systems ranked on the TOP500.

“InfiniBand leads the industry in system efficiency, which is a key factor in controlling HPC costs,” said Bill Lee, IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chair. “While some 10GbE-based Cloud systems are breaking into the TOP500, they must do so with a massive amount of servers since these systems only achieve 20 to 40 percent compute efficiency. InfiniBand is designed to produce leading performance and up to 99.8 percent efficiency to fully utilize data center infrastructures at any scale—resulting in lower CapEx and OpEx, and higher data center ROI.”

Published twice a year and publicly available at www.top500.org, the TOP500 list ranks the world’s most powerful computer systems according to the LINPAC benchmark rating system.

Other TOP500 takeaways include:

Enhanced Data Rate (EDR 100Gb/s) InfiniBand, IBTA’s latest standard, is utilized in four systems
161 systems deploy Fourteen Data Rate (FDR 56Gb/s) InfiniBand, a 16 percent year over year increase

InfiniBand’s ability to carry multiple traffic types over a single connection makes it ideal for clustering, communications, storage and management. As a result, the interconnect technology is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters, storage and embedded applications that scale from two nodes to a single cluster of tens-of-thousands of nodes.

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 Avago Technologies, Cray, HP, 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