QLogic InfiniBand Powers Intel Sandy Bridge-E LLNL Cluster

QLogic has just announced that the company’s high-performance InfiniBand solutions were employed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) inside an Intel Sandy Bridge-E powered cluster that upon completion is expected to become one of the fastest systems of its kind in the world.

The cluster, which is known as "Zin," was delivered in two phases to LLNL with the last phase of nearly 1500 nodes arriving at Lawrence Livermore on October 27.

The final installation was completed in a just a few days from now, allowing Lawrence Livermore time to submit Zin's performance to the TOP500 which is expected to occupy the 15th position in the list.

In addition to its high-performance, Zin is also one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers on the TOP500 list, and one of the highest-performing "pure" Intel Xeon Processor-based systems, producing up to 837 megaflops per watt.

"Not only is Zin the highest performing future Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based cluster, but it is the very model of energy efficiency as one of the industry's top-performing 'pure' x86-based HPC clusters," said Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager, network solutions group, QLogic.

“Setup was incredibly swift, due in large part to QLogic's TrueScale InfiniBand architecture and maturity.

"Our TrueScale architecture is the only InfiniBand offering on the market that is designed from the ground up and specifically optimized for demanding, large-scale HPC environments like those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory," concluded the company’s rep.

As far as the hardware configuration of the Zin cluster is concerned, this is comprised out of 2916 nodes delivering a total of 46,208 computing cores using Intel Xeon E5 processors on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture.

All these are linked together using QLogic 12000 Series switches and 7300 Series TrueScale InfiniBand adapters.