Voltaire’s New Grid Director™ 4700 Switches Interconnected with HP
Supercomputer Offers Extreme Scalability and Ultra Low Latency for KIT
Voltaire Ltd. (NASDAQ: VOLT), a leading provider of scale-out data
center fabrics, today announced that the Karlsruhe Institute of
Technology (KIT) has selected Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and
Unified Fabric Manager (UFM™) software for an HP supercomputer dedicated
to cloud computing research. KIT’s new supercomputer will serve as one
of the centers of excellence for Open Cirrus™, an open cloud computing
research testbed designed to support research into the design,
provisioning and management of services at a global, multi-data center
scale.
“As part of the Open Cirrus™ project, KIT’s new supercomputer will build
and optimize cloud applications for use in data centers around the
world,” said Professor Rudolf Lohner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
“We selected Voltaire’s Grid Director™ 4700 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches
because of the high performance and extreme scalability enabled by the
switch’s double-density fabric boards. 40 Gb/s bandwidth coupled with
Voltaire’s UFM software helps us improve application performance and
offer more efficient service delivery in our multi-tenant cloud
environment.”
The HP supercomputer consists of 334 HP ProLiant DL2x170h G6 and HP
ProLiant DL4x170h G6 servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500
series and is interconnected with two Voltaire Grid Director 4700
switches. The Grid Director 4700 features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s
InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports
using double-density fabric boards. The double-density fabric boards are
the basis for the HyperScale™ architecture, a unique stackable
architecture for building larger configurations into the hundreds and
thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than
alternative solutions.
To further optimize the supercomputer’s performance and simplify
management of the large, multi-tenant fabric, KIT selected Voltaire’s
new UFM software – the industry’s first comprehensive management
software that takes a fabric-wide view of the infrastructure to optimize
performance. Unlike other management software platforms that are
device-oriented and involve tedious manual processes, UFM software
provides IT managers with a logical view of their infrastructure.
