InfiniBand Growing …

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, announced that IB is the interconnect of choice for 45% of the world’s most powerful computers listed on the TOP500 published Monday at SC12.

The number of IB-connected systems increased to 224 in November 2012, from 210 in June 2012. IB continues to be the most-used interconnect on the TOP500 list.

In June 2012, IB surpassed all other interconnect technologies on the TOP500 list – the first time since its creation in 1999. The latest list shows an increase in adoption. IB currently connects 45% of computer systems on the list, including 52% of the TOP100, 53% of the TOP200, 50% of the TOP300, 46% of the TOP400 and 45% of the TOP500.

"IB offers the highest performance standards-based connectivity solution currently available on the market and we’re seeing a steady increase in its usage by systems on the Top500 over the past several years," said Bill Lee, co-chair of the IBTA Marketing Working Group. "The prevalent usage of IB in the world’s fastest computers is translating into benefits for enterprise data centers; from medical research to climate modeling to mission critical financial services data, we’re seeing IB implemented as the fastest way to move data while maximizing system ROI."

IB delivers bandwidth up to 56Gb/s with application latencies of 1 microsecond to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. IB is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters and embedded environments that scale from two nodes up to clusters with thousands of nodes.

The TOP500 list is published twice a year and ranks the most powerful computers worldwide, providing statistics for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures.