Performance Case Studies

Mellanox proven performance and scalability abilities are the driving forces of the most powerful compute clusters in the world, as published in the Top500 list.

Galactic Computing

• 3.413TFlops , 562 Intel Xeon EM64T CPUs
• Mellanox InfiniBand MemFree
• 820MB/s storage throughput
• 84.35% Linpack efficiency WORLD’S HIGHEST REPORTED RATING on x86!

Having installed successfully in Nov. 2004 a GT1000 Supercomputing Blade System (1 Teraflops) at Beijing Biomedical Research Institute, Galactic Computing just completed another GT4000 Supercomputing Blade System (281 blades, 562 Intel® Xeon™ processors) which has attained the world rank of 100 according to the 2005 June 22nd release of Top500 supercomputers list. The peak performance of the entire system is 4.046 Teraflops and the HPLinpack performance is 3.413 Teraflops which corresponds to the efficiency of 84.35%.

GT4000 result demonstrates the highest HPLinpack efficiency in the world among teraflop s scale supercomputers based on x86 processors which have been announced to date.

Dr. Steve Chen, CEO and Founder of Galactic Computing and Chief System Architect of Supercomputing Blade System, said, “While we will crank up system performance gradually, we will continue to focus in creative system architecture and design to achieve highly parallel system efficiency, reliability, usability, and most importantly the actual deliverable performance based on real customers applications solution time and total cost of ownership for a wide range of scientific, engineering and commercial applications in fast growing China and global markets”.

“Incorporating Intel-based platforms and industry standard technologies such as InfiniBand, Gala ctic’s system delivers incredible teraflop s performance in a very efficient manner, enabling faster design and deployment opportunities,” said Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group of Intel Corporation, “This is where high-performance computing is headed. Intel, working with companies like Gala ctic and Mellanox, is committed to continue delivering these super-fast computers that help speed scientific research, exploration and many other important areas to all of humankind.”

Also, this is the one and only supercomputer in China with completely embedded end-to-end InfiniBand 10Gb from blade-to-blade and blade-to-storage with 4 microseconds latency (instead of 50 milliseconds as most 1Gb Ethernet networked server clusters) and can achieve storage data throughput rate up to 820MB/s (two to three times faster and yet cheaper than Fiber Channel SAN).

Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC)

• 41.4TFlops
• 1300 Dell PowerEdge 1955 servers with 5200 Intel Xeon 5100 CPU cores

The Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) is an Air Force Research Laboratory Center managed by the University of Hawaii.  MHPCC is an Allocated Distributed Center of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program, providing computational resources to the research and development, test and evaluation, and warfighter communities.

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NASA

• 52TFlops, 10K Itanium-2 CPUs
• 85%  efficiency rating on LINPACK benchmark

The cluster enabled scientists to simulate multiple decades of ocean changes in only days (compared to five years of simulation every year on previous systems) and engineers to compute thousands of flight characteristics of aircraft designs in a single day (versus years on previous systems).

"Columbia will have a huge impact on NASA's ability to solve truly complex problems in engineering design, weather modeling, astronomy, and many other mission critical applications, " said Bill Thipgen, Columbia project manager at Ames Research Center, Mountain View, Calif. "The high performance InfiniBand interconnect is a key component of the system, facilitating highly efficient communication for the second most powerful supercomputer in the world.

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