Mellanox Interconnect Solutions Accelerates the Most Powerful Supercomputer
The growth in the computing capability of China is nothing short of impressive. While the US still has some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and holds several spots in the top 10, the number one and two positions belong to China according to the 47th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers. The Sunway TaihuLight as it is called has a system with 93 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the LINPACK benchmark.
The interconnect solutions for the Sunway TaihuLight is being provided by Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems.
Mellanox was able to accelerate this supercomputer using its offloading architecture interconnect solution, which resulted in a record performance with the scalability and efficiency that was needed to connect the highest number of nodes and CPU cores within a single supercomputer.
The 93 Petaflops was achieved by connecting close to 41 thousand nodes and more than ten million CPU cores. The technology Mellanox has developed is deployed by the Chinese as well as 45 Petascale systems in the world, which makes up around 50 percent of the total global Petascale-performance systems on the TOP500 list.
The company continues to hold this position with innovations that address the high capacity needs of supercomputers. With the new Mellanox InfiniBand-based Exascale technology, along with ConnectX-5 adapters and Switch-IB2 switch systems, it will further push the limitations of supercomputers builders who are looking to break records year after year.
"InfiniBand technology has been accelerating multiple generations of the world’s fastest supercomputers due to its performance, efficiency, scalability, robustness, and proven and standards-based leadership. Mellanox enabled the first Petaflop system in 2008, and now enables the world’s first 100 Petaflop supercomputer," said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.
The systems Mellanox supports are now being used to carry out complex simulations around the world. But it is also used by companies that need high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage, telecom and financial services to accelerate application runtime and maximize business results.
The TOP500 supercomputer list is published twice a year and it ranks the world’s most powerful computer systems according to the Linpack benchmark rating system. Increasingly, the Asia-Pacific region is capturing the largest share of the 500 systems in the world, and it now has 218, with the rest of the world making up the remainder 282.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
