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QLogic TrueScale InfiniBand
What is InfiniBand?
InfiniBand (IB) is an efficient I/O technology that provides high-speed data transfers and ultra-low latencies for computing and storage over a highly reliable and scalable single fabric.
InfiniBand is a high-bandwidth, low-latency network interconnect solution that has grown tremendous market share in the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster community. InfiniBand is a popular and widely used I/O fabric among customers within the Top500 supercomputers: major Universities and Labs; Life Sciences; Biomedical; Oil and Gas (Seismic, Reservoir, Modeling Applications); Computer Aided Design and Engineering; Enterprise Oracle; and Financial Applications.
How Does it Help an End-user?
InfiniBand was designed to meet the evolving needs of the high performance computing market. Computational science depends on InfiniBand to deliver:
- High Bandwidth. Supports host connectivity of 10Gbps with Single Data Rate (SDR), 20Gbps with Double Data Rate (DDR), and 40Gbps with Quad Data Rate (QDR).
- Low Latency. Accelerates the performance of HPC and enterprise computing applications by providing ultra-low latencies.
- Superior Cluster Scaling. Point-to-point latency remains low as node and core counts scale —1.2 μs. Highest real message per adapter: each PCIe® x16 adapter drives 26 million messages per second. Excellent communications/ computation overlap among nodes in a cluster.
- High Efficiency. InfiniBand allows reliable protocols like Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) communication to occur between interconnected hosts, thereby increasing efficiency.
- Fabric Consolidation and Energy Savings. InfiniBand can consolidate networking, clustering, and storage data over a single fabric, which significantly lowers overall power, real estate, and management overhead in data centers. Enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities support running and managing multiple workloads and traffic classes.
- The Power Of Family. QLogic has the most comprehensive portfolio of InfiniBand products available. The TrueScale™ architecture is QLogic’s base platform for a family of InfiniBand host channel adapters and switches that deliver unmatched performance under load. While maintaining compliance with IB standards, an end-to-end QLogic TrueScale IB solution provides an industry unique combination of performance, flexibility, ease-of-use, and low-power options that provide a true enterprise class solution that meets the needs of both small and large companies. The QLogic TrueScale ASIC allows implementation and integration of an expanded set of features into the QLogic family of IB products, bringing a new level of utility and ease of use that significantly reduces time-to-production, scalability, raw speed, and flexibility for the most challenging problems with unsurpassed reliability and availability.
- Price/Performance. High bandwidth and low-latency benefits of InfiniBand drives superior performance at attractive price/ performance metrics due to the competitive pricing of InfiniBand components over alternate technologies.
- Data Integrity and Reliability. InfiniBand provides the highest levels of data integrity by performing Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs) at each fabric hop and end-to-end across the fabric to avoid data corruption. To meet the needs of mission critical applications and high levels of availability, InfiniBand provides fully redundant and lossless I/O fabrics with automatic failover path and link layer multi-paths.
| Vertical Market Application | Segment | InfiniBand Value |
| Oil & Gas | Mix of Independent Service Provider (ISP) and home grown codes: reservoir modeling | Low latency, high bandwidth |
| Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) | Mostly Independent Software Vendor (ISV) codes: crash, air flow, and fluid flow simulations | High message rate, low latency, scalability |
| Government | Home grown codes: labs, defense, weather, and a wide range of apps. | High message rate, low latency, scalability, high bandwidth |
| Education | Home grown and open source codes: a wide range of apps. | High message rate, low latency, scalability, high bandwidth |
| Financial | Mix of ISP and home grown codes: market simulation and trading floor | High performance IP, scalability, high bandwidth |
| Life and Materials Science | Mostly ISV codes: molecular simulation, computational chemistry, and biology apps | Low latency, high message rates |
Top 10 Reasons to Use QLogic TrueScale IB
- Predictable Low Latency Under Load — Less Than 1.0 μs
- Quad Data Rate (QDR) Performance
- Flexible QoS Maximizes Bandwidth Use
- Unmatched Scalability — 18 to 864 Ports per Switch
- Highly Reliable and Available
- Lowest Per-Port Power and Cooling Requirements
- Easy to Install and Manage
- Protects Existing InfiniBand Investments
- Modular Configuration Flexibility
- Option to Gateway to Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks
