This week QLogic announced that its InfiniBand technologies are powering the world’s fastest cluster powered by Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” Xeon E5 processors. Ranked at #15 on the TOP500, the “Zin” supercomputer at LLNL comprises 46,208 cores in 2916 nodes, producing up to 837 megaflops per watt.
The ever more powerful computing systems Lawrence Livermore requires to fulfill its national security missions must be balanced with increasing energy efficiency,” said Matt Leininger of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “To meet its scientific computing demands, the Laboratory works with industry leaders to advance HPC.”
I talked to QLogic’s Joe Yaworski about what makes the Zin system so remarkable. He said that the fact that this Top15 cluster achieves nearly a Petaflop with less than 3000 nodes is a testament to the efficiency of the Sandy Bridge processor and QLogic’s TrueScale interconnect.
Yaworski also noted that the Scalable Unit architecture developed by the Tri-Labs enabled the cluster to be deployed very rapidly at the end of October. Using Qlogic’s TrueScale InfiniBand software, LLNL was able to install and configure the cluster in record time and complete the TOP500 benchmark.
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