Some of fastest supercomputers use InfiniBand

Over the summer I highlighted the fact that Gigabit Ethernet was being used in many of the world's fastest supercomputers. This week, Mellanox points to the latest list of supercomputers and highlights the growth in InfiniBand switches as an alternative.

Mellanox Technologies says the 40Gbps variety of its InfiniBand switches and adapters provides the interconnection on one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Its InfiniBand products in general provide interconnection for four of the top 10 fastest systems.

The company also says InfiniBand is the fastest-growing cluster interconnect on the list of Top 500 supercomputers. In the most recent version of this list, which is updated twice a year, 142 systems, or 28%, are connected with InfiniBand - and that number is up 16% since the last time the list was published. Meanwhile, the number of InfiniBand-connected cores has grown 150% since last year, from 340,000 to 860,000.

Mellanox is quick to point out that all of those 142 systems use Mellanox switch silicon, and 95% of them integrate adapter products that use Mellanox silicon. InfiniBand is the most used interconnect among the top 100 supercomputers, with 54 clusters.

The supercomputers are being used for a range of applications, from high-performance computing to commercial technical computing to enterprise data centers, Mellanox says.

And here's an interesting statistic from the Top 500 list - the total performance of all of those InfiniBand-based systems has grown from 6Petaflops to 8.8Petaflops in the last year.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.