Voltaire Ltd. has announced that 50 percent of their InfiniBand deployments are featured in the 31st edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers that was released recently.

 

The company is a provider of grid backbone solutions for data centers. Voltaire switches and software power 64 of the Top500 sites. This is roughly 20 percent of the entire list’s total compute power.

 

The interconnect performance needed for a record-breaking petaflop of computing power is being delivered by Voltaire for Los Alamos. This enables customers in commercial industries to accelerate performance of business-critical applications.

 

They also provide a high performance interconnect for the world’s most powerful supercomputer whose performance is greater than a petaflop, the NNSA/Los Alamos’ Roadrunner supercomputer.

 

Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire said, “Our customers on this new list represent leading companies in life sciences, automotive and manufacturing as well as top government and research institutions. We are pleased to advance our leadership position on the Top500 with more deployments than any other InfiniBand switch vendor.”

 

InfiniBand switches, Voltaire’s Grid Director deliver 20 Gbps bandwidths and latencies of less than one microsecond. This increases the application’s performance by over 300% as compared to using Ethernet. The power-efficient design consumes lesser power and provides cooling requirements.

 

Voltaire also plans to develop a 40 gigabits per second (Gbps)/quad data rate (QDR) switching platform by late 2008.

 

Published twice a year, the Top500 list ranks the most powerful supercomputers worldwide according to their performance on the LINPACK benchmark. The report provides insight into computing trends and technology adoption.  

 

Headquartered in Herzeliya, Israel, Voltaire was founded in 1997. The company’s U.S. headquarters is in Billerica, Massachusetts. They design and develop server and storage switching and software solutions. These make high-performance grid computing possible within the data center.

 

Director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software comprise Voltaire’s range of products. The server and storage switching and software solutions from Voltaire are called the Voltaire Grid Backbone.

These products are being used by a wide range of end customers including governmental, research and educational organizations, as well as enterprises in the manufacturing, oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries.