Voltaire Provides IB to Dawning 5000A System

Voltaire Ltd. announced that its Grid Director 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel gateways are providing the high-performance, low latency server and storage fabric for the Dawning 5000A system, the world’s largest supercomputer based on Windows HPC Server 2008. Sponsored by the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, the Dawning 5000A system ranked No. 10 on the new Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers released this week and is also China’s most powerful supercomputer.

Achieving a peak performance of 180.6 teraflops or 180.6 trillion calculations per second, the Dawning 5000A system consists of Dawning blade servers based on 6600 quad core AMD Opteron processors running Windows HPC Server 2008. The system is interconnected with 10 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 switches, each with 288 ports of 20 Gb/s InfiniBand and uses 36 Voltaire SR4G High Performance Storage Routers with FalconStor software for high performance connectivity between the InfiniBand fabric and Fibre Channel storage. The Voltaire SR4G improves the performance of applications accessing Fibre Channel storage by up to 200% and simplifies connectivity of InfiniBand fabrics to existing Storage Area Networks (SANs).

“The Dawning 5000A supercomputer with Voltaire InfiniBand delivers the ultra high performance server and storage connectivity needed to accelerate applications used on the system,” said Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning Information Industry Co., Ltd. “With the help of Voltaire we were able to build China’s most powerful supercomputer to further important research initiatives in the areas of commercial and research applications, including, earthquake prediction, weather forecasting, genomics, and stock trading analysis.”

“The Dawning 5000A represents a major achievement for Windows-based HPC and is a clear example of the application performance benefits that can be attained by using InfiniBand in Windows data centers,” said Ryan Waite, product unit manager, Windows HPC Server division at Microsoft.

“Voltaire solutions are widely-proven in HPC to accelerate the performance of applications in large, clustered environments,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “Voltaire switches and gateways deliver unparalleled performance for both the server and storage connectivity in the Dawning 5000A system. We’re pleased to have been chosen by Dawning Information Industry to enable China’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer.”