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Voltaire Attempts to Enlighten Irish CollegeVoltaire first had a hand in France’s Age of Enlightenment, in the form of a Paris-born writer and philosopher. Now Voltaire is attempting further enlightenment, this time with clustered supercomputers in Ireland.
By DAVID R. BUTCHER, Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions Voltaire, in this case a provider of interconnect solutions for high-performance grid computing, today announced that Dublin, Ireland-based Trinity College has deployed a clustered supercomputer, an IBM xSeries, with Voltaire grid interconnect to advance its computational science and research initiatives.
The 356-node cluster is the largest IBM-powered InfiniBand cluster deployed to date, boasts the Massachusetts-based company.
“Using industry-standard platforms and technologies, this powerful cluster is poised to help further the advancement of science and computer technology,” said Diana Grimmer, Worldwide Linux Product Marketing Manager, IBM Systems & Technology Group, in a company statement.
The Trinity supercomputer will be used to conduct research in a variety of areas, including physical sciences, biomolecular sciences and computer science (oddly enough, not philosophy or literature). The IBM supercomputer uses the Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288-port multiservice switch for its high-bandwidth, low-latency cluster interconnect. Voltaire’s multiservice switches offer integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fiber Channel connectivity; they are deployed in some of the world’s largest supercomputers and grids.
The supercomputer, with an expected peak performance of 3.4 teraflops, consists of 356 IBM eServer model 326 servers with dual AMD model 250 Opteron processors and 10 Gbps InfiniBand connectivity from Voltaire. The system also uses IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), a high-performance, shared disk file system that provides quick data access from all of the nodes within the cluster.
“This new supercomputer will contribute to important progress in computational science in Ireland,” said Dr. Graeme Watson, Director of the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. “Interconnecting the IBM platforms with Voltaire’s 288-port InfiniBand switches gives us a high-performance, scalable supercomputer that allows us to tackle larger and more complex simulations than have been possible before.”
The efficiencies that the technology will bring to the Centre are aimed at benefiting areas such as cancer research, new drug design and vaccines, pollution-controls development and new electronic devices.
For more information about this near-Boston-based company, visit www.voltaire.com.
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David R. Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. To see more articles by David Butcher, please visit:
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