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Infiniband fabric

bbaley
Level 3
Level 3

I have been asked to deploy an Infiniband fabric for a high performance computing application. How do I know it requires IB and that GE wouldn't do the job?

Thanks

1 Reply 1

mslavin
Level 1
Level 1

Good question, and while there are certainly technical reasons for choosing one over the other, this discussion is occasionally as much political as it is technical :-)

All kidding aside, there are many factors to consider with such environments, and certainly in some cases, GigE or 10GigE will make sense, and in others, IB will have the edge. Rather then trying to post the many possibilities in this forum, there are some useful links that may help answer your question.

I great place to start is the following link:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps6418/ps6419/ps6421/prod_white_paper0900aecd8043bb6c_ns500_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html

Among other things, if you scroll down to Table 2 on this link you will find some common pros and cons of each.

For a Cisco page that provides a great starting point for all things with regard to High Performance Computing take a look at:

www.cisco.com/go/hpc

Lastly, if you want to get a feel for what others in the HPC world are doing (could be useful to see trends in technologies deployed), check out the top500 site, where you can do various searches on how many of the top 500 supercomputers in the world use what technology as an interconnect (as well as look at past lists to see the general direction these systems are taking with their interconnects):

http://www.top500.org/

Hope this was of assistance.

Matt

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