Supermicro Goes InfiniBand, Introduces High-Performance Server Gear

Supermicro has just announced the availability of high-bandwidth, low-latency InfiniBand connectivity solutions for SuperBlade servers and high-performance computing gear. The new network adapters and integrated switch products built using Mellanox technologies controllers, that are able to deliver data transfer rates of up to 20 Gb/s.

According to Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro, the new networking gear is targeted at the enterprise sector, and allows businesses get full advantage of ultra-high data transfer rates, and opens the gates for low-latency hardware-based I/O virtualization. "Our SuperBlade IB switch supports up to fourteen internal ports and ten external ports for a total switch bandwidth of 960 Gb/s," he claims.

Supermicro has been shipping 4X DDR InfiniBand blade switches since late last year. The company touts the SuperBlade servers as the fastest and the densest blade server solution in the industry, with 960 processing cores per 42U rack. Their compact size blends with an easy-to-maintain architecture, which is alleged to cut down on IS space and maintenance costs

"We are working with Supermicro to deliver a large breadth of optimized multi-core computing and storage servers," said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO at Mellanox Technologies. "With outstanding performance and power efficiency, Mellanox InfiniBand-accelerated, Supermicro servers and blade servers are ideal for enterprise data center environments and high-performance computing applications."

Supermicro's 1U Twin servers support up to 16 processor cores via two DP nodes, each of them equipped with an onboard Mellanox 20Gb/s ConnectX InfiniBand controller in 1U of rack space. The dual-port InfiniBand solution is available immediately to the company's customers, and the upgrade is suitable especially for the 6015TW-INF high-performance computer server, as well as for the 6015T-INF 1U Twin SuperServer products.