Although shadowy government labs and cone-head research organizations typically feature prominently on the Top 500 list, a slew of activity around InfiniBand over recent months suggests that the technology is poised to break out of this rarefied niche. (See HP Teams With Cisco, InfiniBand Goes Mainstream, Cisco Joins 20-Gig InfiniBand Party, and Cisco Doubles Up InfiniBand.)
In a report last month, analyst firm IDC highlighted the growing adoption of "HPC-like" applications in the energy and financial sectors as drivers of this trend. (See InfiniBand to Transcend HPC.) The consultancy predicted the InfiniBand switch market will grow from $94.9 million in 2006 to more than $612 million by 2011.
Users have cited the low latency of InfiniBand as ideal for storage networking, opening up the possibility of major storage grids, as the technology slowly moves into the mainstream. (See Interop: Mixed Messages on InfiniBand, and InfiniBand Ambivalence.)
More and more vendors are now getting in on this act, with the likes of Engenio and DataDirect Networks offering native InfiniBand storage systems, which let customers connect directly through InfiniBand switches, eliminating the need for Fibre Channel-to-InfiniBand bridges. (See InfiniBand Natives Stirring, Engenio Goes Native , and Verari Ships InfiniBand SAN.)
Today's Top 500 list also underlines the fast-moving nature of high-performance computing. The minimum performance required to make it onto the list is now 4.005 TFlop/s (trillions of calculations per second), up from 2.737 TFlop/s just six months ago. Underlining the increasing speed of supercomputers, the system ranked number 500 on the current list, an HP Superdome-powered system at German auto manufacturer BMW, would been ranked 216 only six months ago when the last list was produced.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
