* Myricom's Myri-10G switch will be used to interconnect servers of DAS-3 grid
Myricom announced last week that its 10Gbps Ethernet gear is being used to interconnect supercomputer clusters into a distributed cluster located at four Dutch universities.
The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer consists of five Linux clusters located at the University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit, Leiden University and Delft University of Technology. They will use the DAS-3 grid for research in distributed computing; grid computing and services.
The DAS-3 grid will be funded by the Dutch Science Foundation as part of its StarPlane project, which aims to empower grid applications.
The DAS-3 grid has a theoretical aggregate peak performance of more than 3.5 teraflops or 3.5 billion calculations per second. It consists of 550 AMD Opteron-based servers with 1T byte of memory and 100T bytes of storage capacity. The servers run the ClusterVisionOS, a Linux-based clustered operating system.
Interconnecting the Opteron servers is Myricom’s Myri-10G switch, which connects to a Myri-10G PCI-Express adapter in each server. The Myri-10G switch then connects directly to the SURFnet optical network.
Myri-10G is Myricom’s new interconnect – it combines standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet with Myricom’s proprietary Myrinet Express communications protocol.
“We have almost 10 years experience with Myrinet,” says Henri Bal, professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. “We also chose Myrinet based on cost. The alternative is to have local as well as wide-area connections, which are far more expensive.”
The Myri-10G network adapters are available for $795. The switch starts at $6,400 for a 16-port switch.
