Started in 1993, the TOP500 lists the fastest computers used today, ranked according to Linpack benchmark results. Published twice a year, the TOP500 list provides an important tool for tracking usage trends in high-performance computing. The 33rd TOP500 List was released in Hamburg, Germany, during the ISC’09 conference.
This year’s list revealed that Mellanox InfiniBand demonstrated up to 94 percent system utilization, only 6 percent under the theoretical limit, providing users with the best return on investment for their high-performance computing server and storage infrastructure. This year’s TOP500 list reveals that InfiniBand is the only growing industry-standard interconnect solution, increasing 25 percent to 152 systems, representing more than 30 percent of the TOP500. Mellanox ConnectX® InfiniBand adapters and switch systems based on its InfiniScale® III and IV switch silicon provide the scalable, low-latency, and power-efficient interconnect for the world’s fastest supercomputer and the majority of the top 100 systems. Mellanox end-to-end 40Gb/s InfiniBand solutions deliver the leading performance and highest Top10 system efficiency in the 10th ranked Jülich cluster.
Highlights of InfiniBand usage on the June 2009 TOP500 list include:
- Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect products connect the world’s fastest supercomputer, 4 of the top 10 most prestigious positions, and 9 of the top 20 systems
- Mellanox InfiniBand provides the highest system utilization, up to 94 percent, which is 50 percent higher than the best GigE-based system
- Mellanox 40Gb/s end-to-end solutions provide the highest system utilization on the top 10, 15% higher than the average top 20 efficiency
- All InfiniBand-based clusters (152 total supercomputers) use Mellanox solutions
- InfiniBand is the most used interconnect among the top 100 supercomputers with 59 systems, nearly 12 times the number of Gigabit Ethernet-based clusters and the number of proprietary high speed cluster interconnects
- The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the list has grown from 606,000 in June 2008 to 1,040,000 in 2009 (72 percent yearly growth)
- InfiniBand is the only growing industry-standard clustered interconnect in the TOP500 with a 25 percent growth rate compared to June 2008
- Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect products present in the TOP500 are used by a diverse list of applications, from large-scale, high-performance computing to commercial technical computing and enterprise data centers
- The entry level for the TOP500 list is 17TFlops, 91% percent higher than the 8.9TFlops necessary to be on the June 2008 list
Full analysis of the TOP500 can be found HERE.
