QLogic provides InfiniBand for HPC environments

QLogic announced this week that this month that its QDR InfiniBand adapters have been chosen by IBM, Dell and HP for high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

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Specifically, IBM will integrate QLogic's 7300 Series 40Gbps QDR (quad-data rate) InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCA) into its IBM System X servers and the company's iDataPlex solution. Dell will also integrate the HCAs with its PowerEdge servers and Precision workstations into HPC environments. Finally, HP will resell QLogic's HCAs and its edge and director-level InfiniBand switches with both its ProLiant and BladeSystem c-Class servers and also offer them as part of the company's HPC United Cluster portfolio.

HP will resell in particular, the QL7342 QDR HCAs for ProLiant DL and ProLiant SL servers and rebrand QLogic's 4x QDR InfiniBand dual-port mezzanine HCAs for use with HP BladeSystem c-Class servers. When used in HPC environments, QLogic's 7300 HCAs deliver high-performance for weather modeling, reservoir simulation, visualization, computational chemistry and computer aided engineering.

HP will also resell QLogic's 12000 Series QDR InfiniBand Switch family, which includes fixed-port edge switches and ultra-scalable director level switches, which can be configured with as few as 18 ports and as many as 864 ports. In addition, the QLogic 12000 Series switches include automated configuration, installation and monitoring, as well as QoS and fabric partitioning. The QLogic switches have an aggregate bandwidth of 51.8TBps and are energy efficient, consuming only 7.8 watts per port.

HP will resell the QLogic 12800-360 Director, the QLogic 12800-180 Director and the HP-branded BLc 4xQDR InfiniBand switch. The 12800-360 will be used with ProLiant DL and SL servers; the QLogic 12800-180 Director will be deployed with ProLiant DL and ProLiant Servers; and, the bladed BLc 4x QDR InfiniBand switch, will be used in the BladeSystem c-Class chassis.

QLogic 7300 Series QDR InfiniBand-to-PCI Express 2 x8 host channel adapters are available in single- and dual-port models and have a unidirectional bandwidth of 3,400Mbps, making them ideal for performance in HPC environments. As the size of clusters grow, additional compute nodes outfitted with QDR InfiniBand HCAs can be added to the cluster and the latency from the message passing interface (MPI) will remain flat.

As for energy savings, the QLogic 7300 host channel adapters consume 3.8 watts in single-port and 4.8 watts in dual-port configurations and thus save power consumption in large HPC scale-outs. In addition, QLogic's 7300 adapters have a small memory footprint and a connectionless operation that eliminates overhead that consumes host resources.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.