Last week at ISC 2015, EXTOLL from Germany introduced its TOURMALET 100G network chip and PCIe Board.
EXTOLL’s network technology is a disruptive innovation in the field of HPC interconnect.” – says Prof. Lippert from Juelich Super Computing Centre – “High performance, support of hostless nodes together with GreenICE makes it a promising candidate for future Exascale Supercomputers.”
This TOURMALET high-performance network ASIC integrates the network interface controller function as well as the network switching functionality in a single chip solution enabling direct networks without external switches. According to the company, TOURMALET achieves 850ns MPI latency, 8.5 GB/s MPI bandwidth, and a message rate in excess of 70 million messages per second.
The TOURMALET 100G incorporates the complete EXTOLL network technology in a single-chip solution. The EXTOLL network is a direct network, i.e. no external switches are required. The chip supports 6+1 links, where the 7th link can be used for break-out functionalities, i.e. attaching I/O, storage, additional accelerators, etc. while at the same time leaving the network topology of the compute network untouched. The network links of Tourmalet 100G run at 100Gb/s physical speed and the ASIC features a PCIe Gen3 x16 interface to connect to CPUs or Accelerators.
EXTOLL GmbH has developed a complete ecosystem for its network consisting of PCI Express plug-in cards, link connectors, electrical network cables, active optical cables, software stack and management software. MPI is supported, and MPI applications can be run without the need to modify the source code.
EXTOLL GmbH showcased TOURMALET 100G for the first time at ISC 2015 with various live-demos. Their hostless-feature was demonstrated by EXTOLL’s novel 2-phase immersion cooling system GreenICETM with super-dense electronics: 32 nodes formed by TOURMALET 100G and Intel Xeon Phi “Knights Corner” (KNC) yield 38.4 TFLOPS peak DP-floating point performance within a 19” x 9U chassis.
EXTOLL’s GreenICE is used for part of the booster nodes of the DEEP Project (Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform), funded by the European Commission through the FP7 program under grant agreement no. 287530. In the follow-up project DEEP-ER, EXTOLL’s TOURMALET will be used for the booster interconnect network.
