Low Latency Interconnects
Many parallel codes benefit greatly from a cluster environment
equipped with a low latency
high-speed interconnect.
InfiniBand
,
Myrinet
, or
Ethernet
technology can all be used to provide the low-latency Interconnect solutions so critical to
many of today's parallel codes, but each will have benefits and trade-offs for your requirements.
Aspen can help you implement a low latency Interconnect solution on your new or existing cluster.
Aspen Systems partners with the leading providers of HPC Interconnect technology in the market today,
Mellanox,
QLogic,
Voltaire,
Myricom, and
Fujitsu,
to bring you the very best solution for your Interconnect needs. Our experienced
engineers can work with you to select the most cost effective and highest
performing Interconnect for your codes and situation, and design an Interconnect solution
with the proper blocking factor, latency, and speed necessary to support
your current and future needs.
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What if you don't know the best Interconnect design for your application?
Not a problem. Our engineering staff has years of experience with many HPC
applications, and can assist you in that decision. Want to see it for yourself?
Aspen provides Benchmarking clusters for this specific purpose. There's no better way to determine your
best solution than to test your code execution on
different Interconnects, architectures, and software environments
with the aid of our experienced engineers.
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Contact Aspen Systems sales
at 1-800-992-9242 to discuss your HPC Interconnect needs today!
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InfiniBand : InfiniBand networking is an industry standard, channel-based, point-to-point
switched fabric interconnect for high-performance networks. InfiniBand networks
provide high-bandwidth, low-latency, and reliability with fail-over capabilities in a scalable
high-performance network. InfiniBand networks also support quality of service, and
can be used to provide a high speed interconnect from compute nodes
to storage systems as well. InfiniBand has become the predominant HPC Interconnect technology in
recent years, with 40 Gb/s full-duplex speeds available today, and even faster speeds
are on the way.
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InfiniBand utilizes a serial (bit-at-a-time) bus design. InfiniBand's message
passing I/O fabric can provide reliability and salability without the increasing
latencies that some older architectures experience as workload or bandwidth usage increases.
More information regarding InfiniBand architecture can be found on the FAQ
located at http://www.infinibandta.org/content/pages.php?pg=technology_faq .
 Aspen Systems can design, build and integrate InfiniBand switching solutions
from eight to thousands of ports per fabric. Management systems for
these switching solutions provide advanced fabric management, heartbeat and
other monitoring too, and may be integrated into the switch hardware depending
on your selected solution.
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Myrinet : Myrinet is a high-speed switch interconnect system that provides a cost-effective,
high-performance, packet communication and switching technology that is widely used
to interconnect high-speed networks and clusters. Myrinet is a low-overhead
low-latency interconnect that includes a number of fault-tolerance features,
including Flow control, error control, and "heartbeat" continuity monitoring on
every link.The newest "fourth-generation" Myrinet, called Myri-10G, supports
a 10 Gb/s data rate and is inter-operable with 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
Myrinet Express API driver tools permits software to directly utilize
high-speed interconnects, bypassing the OS, facilitating very low latency
inter-node communications. Myrinets Fabric Management System (FMS) provides
advanced monitoring and configuration tools to help ensure the continued performance
of your network. As a premier integrator and authorized reseller of Myricom Myrinet
products, Aspen Systems is highly experienced in Myrinet network configuration and
integration.
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Gigabit Ethernet : Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet can offer low latency and be used quite successfully as an HPC Interconnect. While enterprise Ethernet solutions
typically do not offer low latency connections, some companies do provide low latency products suitable for HPC systems.
Aspen uses and recommends both Myricom and Fujitsu
low latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions. These implementations may be very desirable for integration into your existing infrastructure, and can offer
easy manageability and familiarity to your current administrators. Aspen Systems has been working with 10 Gigabit Ethernet vendors since the standard
was implemented to bring 10Gb/s Ethernet technology to the HPC environment. Let our experienced engineering staff help you design and implement your
low-latency 10 Gigabit and Gigabit Ethernet solution today!
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high-speed interconnect.
InfiniBand
