Voltaire Scale-Out InfiniBand Fabric Accelerates South African Supercomputer Powered by Sun Microsystems

By DE Editors

Voltaire Ltd. has announced that the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town,  South Africa has selected a Voltaire 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch as part of its new Sun Microsystems supercomputer. The CHPC is a division of the South African Counsel for Scientific and Industrial Research.

With a peak performance of 27 teraflops, the new supercomputer is the fastest in Africa, according to Voltaire. The supercomputer, based on a Sun Constellation System, includes three Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems, with 144 Sun Blade X6275 server modules using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, and a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 SPARC64 VII quad-core processors.

“At the front-end, CHPC is using a Sun visualization system,  which allows for users to easily view 3D models of their complex data sets. We deployed a Sun Lustre Storage System consisting of 10 AMD Opteron -powered Sun Fire X4540 Open Storage systems, providing half a petabyte of data with the highest price/performance available,” said Stefan Jacobs, South and Eastern Eurpoe systems solution architect for Sun. “All of the server and storage infrastructure is connected by the Voltaire Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand switch.”

The Grid Director 4700 has 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using Voltaire’s HyperScale fabric boards. It uses Voltaire’s stackable architecture for building larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes.

For more information, visit Voltaire Ltd. and Sun Microsystems. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.