The University of Cambridge Chooses Mellanox FDR InfiniBand to Accelerate UK’s Fastest Academic Cluster and Further Space Research

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that its FDR InfiniBand solution provides the University of Cambridge GPU-based supercomputer with leading, scalable performance. The system has a sustained performance of over 250 TF and ranked 166th on the November 2013 TOP500 list of supercomputers. The system was designed to increase energy efficient high-performance computing and ranked second in the November Green500 list that ranks supercomputers by energy efficiency.

The newly deployed supercomputer is partly funded by STFC to drive the SKA computing system development within the newly formed "SKA Open Architecture LAB.” The SKA is a multinational collaboration which is building the world’s largest radio telescope which, at its center, is a requirement for the world’s largest streaming data processor, many times larger than the most powerful HPC system in operation today. The new system will take a central role driving system development for the SKA placing STFC and the University of Cambridge at the forefront of large scale big-data science.

"The network design was specifically architected to provide the highest I/O bandwidth for large scale big-data challenges and to have the highest message possible for large parallel application scaling,” said Paul J. Calleja, Director of High Performance Computing at the University of Cambridge. "We chose Mellanox’s end-to-end FDR InfiniBand interconnects to connect the system, specifically by using their Connect-IB adapters in a dual rail network, as well as utilize the NVIDA GPUDirect RDMA communication acceleration to significantly increase the systems parallel efficiency.”

"We are pleased to have Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand solution as the interconnect of choice for the University of Cambridge’s supercomputer, the UK’s fastest academic-based supercomputer,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Utilizing Mellanox’s Connect-IB adapters, the University of Cambridge is able to take advantage of the adapter’s leading message rate and bandwidth performance to enable fundamental advances in many areas of astrophysics and cosmology.”

Connect-IB is the world’s most scalable server and storage adapter solution for High-Performance Computing (HPC), Web 2.0, cloud, Big Data, financial services, virtualized data centers and storage environments. Connect-IB adapters deliver the highest throughput of 100Gb/s utilizing PCI Express 3.0 x16, unmatched scaling with innovative transport services, sub-microsecond latency and 137 million messages per second – 4X higher message rate over competing solutions.

Available today, Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand solution includes Connect-IB adapter cards, SwitchX®-2 based switches (from 12-port to 648-port), fiber and copper cables, and ScalableHPC accelerator and management software.

Supporting Resources:

• Learn more about Mellanox InfiniBand Switches, Adapter Cards, and Cables
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About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services. More information is available at www.mellanox.com.

Mellanox, ConnectX and SwitchX are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. Connect-IB is a trademark of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.