Woven, Chelsio Set Standard

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Woven SystemsTM, Inc., the leading innovator of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) fabric solutions, and Chelsio Communications, the leading provider of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Wire solutions, today announced performance test results for the world’s largest 10 GE remote direct memory access (RDMA) high performance computing (HPC) cluster built to date. Results from the Sandia National Laboratories 128-node cluster demonstrated twice the average throughput as processors were added and a fraction of the performance variation compared to single data rate (SDR) InfiniBand™.

The benchmark tests were conducted at Sandia using Chelsio’s R310E iWARP host bus adapter (HBA) and Woven’s EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch. A test developed by Sandia was designed to measure the ability to dynamically respond to congestion in the network to deliver the highest levels of throughput and consistent performance.

The combined 10 GE fabric and RDMA solution demonstrated a peak unidirectional bandwidth of 1204 megabytes per second (MB/s), as compared to 960 MB/s for SDR InfiniBand. Moreover, the test results showed that as processors were added, the average throughput for InfiniBand fell to 585 MB/s or 61% of its maximum whereas the 10 GE solution maintained 99% throughput.

“We are pleased to see an industry-standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect that meets the needs of HPC applications,” said John Naegle, senior engineer with Sandia. “The ability of the Woven 10 GE fabric to dynamically respond to congestion significantly reduced the gap between maximum and average throughput compared to InfiniBand, making this solution very attractive for applications with varying I/O profiles. Additionally, we were very impressed with the sustained performance demonstrated with Chelsio’s 10 GE RDMA implementation.”

Woven Systems Inc.Chelsio Communications Inc.