Voltaire, Terrascale products combine for high-performance clusters

Products from Voltaire and Terrascale Technologies can be used together to create InfiniBand-enabled high-performance computing environments.

Terrascale markets a parallel clustered file system that lets the files residing on servers and network-attached storage (NAS) appliances be viewed under a single namespace, while Voltaire’s InfiniBand host channel adapters and its routers interconnect the servers.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus has deployed the Terrascale file system in a 128-node server cluster. The cluster is interconnected with Voltaire InfiniBand products. The cluster consists of a Voltaire 9600 switch and 128 dual-processor Intel Xeon servers. It is used to support message-passing interface applications.

Terrascale’s software works also with Gigabit Ethernet networks and with Myricom’s Myrinet, a proprietary cluster interconnect deployed in numerous environments.

Terrascale’s Terragrid works with a variety of Linux and open source software. It consists of Terragrid Initiators and Terragrid Targets, which allow parallel access to a pool of storage, thus alleviating the need to manage multiple disparate file systems.

Terragrid balances loads across the cluster. The file system supports Unix/Linux Network File System and Microsoft’s Common Information File System. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel and AMD Opteron servers.

Voltaire last week bolstered its InfiniBand offerings with the introduction of IP and Fibre Channel routers, as well as the unveiling of a network boot function for clustered servers that are not equipped with their own disk storage.

Voltaire introduced the IP Router, which connects InfiniBand-enabled server clusters with NAS appliances for storage and the TCP/IP network. The router has four Gigabit Ethernet ports and acts as a Layer 4 InfiniBand-to-IP router.

The company also introduced a Fibre Channel Router which connects server clusters to storage-area networks (SAN) and eliminates the need for placing Fibre Channel host bus adapters in servers.

Plus, Voltaire introduced IBNetBoot, which lets diskless servers boot from clustered storage over an InfiniBand link. It can boot servers from NAS or SAN storage.

The Voltaire Fibre Channel Router is available now for $7,000. The Voltaire IP Router and Voltaire IBNetBoot are expected to ship in August.