The New Face of the TOP500

In the recent lists, the TOP500 coverage has shifted from pure high-performance computing (HPC) to include more enterprise-based solutions. In the latest TOP500 release, the 30th list, published in November 2007, the majority of the systems were enterprise datacenter (EDC)-based, mainly interconnected rack-mounted systems, while the minority of the systems were the traditional high-performance computers, mainly cluster-based solutions. In this article we will analyze the historical and current technological trends in high-performance computing and provide an updated analysis model for the TOP500 project.

"The only constant is change," said Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher. This is certainly true when describing the market of high-performance computing. The HPC market is characterized by a rapid change of architectures, technologies and usage. The only continuous, steady characteristic of HPC is the ever-growing demand for performance, showing an increase of 100X every ten years based on the TOP500 list.

The enterprise datacenter market is less tolerant to rapid changes, and typically changes are much more moderate. While the HPC market drives the technology further and evaluates many leading-edge architectures, only the proven solutions that have been widely adopted by HPC, and in particular by the commercial HPC markets, are accepted and spread into the EDC market.

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InfiniBand Software and Protocols Enable Seamless Off-the-shelf Applications Deployment Whitepaper

The InfiniBand software stack is designed ground up to enable ease of application deployment. IP and TCP socket applications can avail of InfiniBand performance without requiring any change to existing applications that run over Ethernet

Introduction

InfiniBand architecture defines a high-bandwidth, low-latency clustering interconnect that is used for high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise data center (EDC) class applications. It is an industry standard developed by the InfiniBand Trade Association (www.InfiniBandTA.org).

Since the release of the specification, the InfiniBand community has been active in developing software for all major OS platforms including Linux open source software for the InfiniBand architecture. The Linux software community, comprising of major suppliers to the HPC and EDC markets collaborate on joint open source software development as part of the OpenFabrics alliance (www.OpenFabrics.org, previously called OpenIB.org).

The InfiniBand software stack is designed ground up to enable ease of application deployment. IP and TCP socket applications can avail of InfiniBand performance without requiring any change to existing applications that run over Ethernet. The same applies to SCSI, iSCSI and file system applications. Upper layer protocols that reside over the low level InfiniBand adapter device driver and device independent API (also called verbs) provide industry standard interfaces to enable seamless deployments of off-the-shelf applications.

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