Infiniband Most Used High-speed Interconnect on HPC

The Infiniband Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, highlighted the latest TOP500 List, which reports the world’s first and fourth fastest supercomputers are accelerated by IB.

The results also show that IB continues to be the most used high-speed interconnect on the list, reinforcing its status as the high performance interconnect technology. The updated list reflects continued demand for IB’s unparalleled combination of network bandwidth, low latency, scalability and efficiency.

IB connects 77% of the new HPC systems added since the June 2017 list, eclipsing the 55% gain from the previous six month period. This upward trend indicates increasing IB usage by HPC system architects designing new clusters to solve larger, more complex issues. Additionally, IB is the preferred fabric of the AI and deep learning systems currently featured on the list.

The latest TOP500 List also featured positive developments for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology. All 23 systems running 25GbE or higher are RoCE capable. The association expects the number of RoCE enabled systems on the list to rise as more systems look to take advantage of advanced high-speed Ethernet interconnects for further performance and efficiency gains.

“IB being the preferred interconnect for new HPC systems shows the increasing demand for the performance it can deliver. Its place at #1 and #4 are excellent examples of that performance,” said Bill Lee, IBTA marketing working group co-chair. “Besides of delivering world-leading performance and scalability, IB guarantees backward and forward compatibility, ensuring users highest ROI and future proofing their data centers.”

The TOP500 List is published twice per year and ranks the top supercomputers worldwide based on the LINPAC benchmark rating system, providing statistics for tracking trends in system performance and architecture.

The IBTA is led by a steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle and QLogic.