Virginia Tech Deploys 29-Teraflop Mac Cluster

A new 29-teraflop Mac supercomputing cluster, based on 324 Mac Pros, now calls Virginia Tech home. Particularly, the cluster is located at the Center for High-End Computing Systems (CHECS) within the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

According to various reports, the system was allegedly ranked in the Top 100 systems of the June 2008 Top500 list of supercomputers.

Mellanox Technologies' 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology is used to interconnect the machines. Just yesterday, Mellanox announced that its 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology interconnects the new 29TFlops computer systems research cluster. Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies, said a few words, in light of their accomplishment:

"Mellanox continues to lead the high-performance computing and enterprise data center industry with the highest performing interconnect technology that delivers unmatched performance for parallel compute clusters," said Omura. "In 2003 we partnered with Virginia Tech to build the first 10Gb/s InfiniBand large-scale cluster that was ranked number three on the Top500 list at the time. We are excited to partner with Virginia Tech for the first large-scale cluster installation using 40Gb/s InfiniBand, which leverages the mature InfiniBand ecosystem to support the ever increasing demands for efficient and scalable compute systems."

Srinidhi Varadarajan, Director of CHECS at Virginia Tech also added a few words. "Our mission is to build computing systems and environments that can efficiently and usably span the scale from department-sized machines to national-scale resources, and will meet the day-to-day needs of computational scientists," said Varadarajan. "Mellanox's 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology brings the necessary capabilities to our research activities and will be the focus for the design and deployment of the next generation of high-end systems."

Mellanox's 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology provides the necessary scalability and performance for the CHECS research activities. It is said to become the foundation for the development of next generation, power-aware high-end computing resources.