InfiniBand and OpenFabrics Software (OFS) Continue to Lead the TOP500 List in Efficiency and Overall Systems

BEAVERTON, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The InfiniBand® Trade Association (IBTA) and the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) today announced that 204 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers accelerate performance through InfiniBand and OpenFabrics Software (OFS). At 41 percent of the TOP500 List, the InfiniBand fabric, together with OFS open source software, continues to be the interconnect of choice for the leading supercomputing systems. Furthermore, InfiniBand and OFS systems outperform competing technologies in overall efficiency, scoring an 85 percent list average for compute efficiency—with one system achieving a remarkable 99.8 percent.

“The OFA works diligently to support the maintenance and development of RDMA fabric software packages that deliver robust solutions with the microsecond latency and high bandwidth performance required by the HPC industry.”

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The impact of InfiniBand and OFS in the TOP500 grows as the list is broken down by application areas and higher performance levels. Together, the technologies enable 70 percent of the High Performance Computing (HPC) systems segment. This segment includes academic, research and government fields, all of which require high bandwidth and CPU efficiency for processing massive data sets. For supercomputers capable of Petascale performance, the number of InfiniBand and OFS systems grew to 45, up from 33 a year ago.

“InfiniBand provides HPC architects with a unique combination of superior performance, efficiency, scalability and low latency—all of which is defined within an open standard ecosystem by leading industry experts,” said Barry Barnett, InfiniBand Trade Association Co-Chair. “While the IBTA has a robust roadmap for even higher InfiniBand bandwidth, supercomputer designers will also be particularly focused on efficiency gains to control overall system costs. The TOP500 List demonstrates that InfiniBand and OFS can deliver on that concern as the technologies’ CPU offloading architecture yields the industry’s highest compute efficiency.”

“Supercomputers powered by InfiniBand and OFS reach their highest performance capacity through the speed and efficiency delivered by Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA),” said Susan Coulter, OpenFabrics Alliance Chair. “The OFA works diligently to support the maintenance and development of RDMA fabric software packages that deliver robust solutions with the microsecond latency and high bandwidth performance required by the HPC industry.”

Published twice a year and publicly available at www.top500.org, the TOP500 list ranks the world’s most powerful computer systems according to the LINPAC benchmark rating system.

InfiniBand’s ability to carry multiple traffic types over a single connection makes it ideal for clustering, communications, storage and management. As a result, the interconnect technology is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters, storage and embedded applications that scale from two nodes to a single cluster of tens-of-thousands of nodes. OFS, an open source software, enables RDMA fabrics, such as InfiniBand, to run applications that require extreme speeds, Petascale-level scalability and utility-class reliability.

About the InfiniBand® Trade Association

The InfiniBand® Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand and the RoCE specifications. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle, and QLogic. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand and RoCE specifications. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand and RoCE from an industry perspective through online, marketing and public relations engagements, and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is a 501(c) (6) non-profit company that develops, tests, licenses and distributes the OpenFabrics Software (OFS) – multi-platform, high performance, low-latency and energy-efficient open-source RDMA software. OpenFabrics Software is used in business, operational, research and scientific infrastructures that require fast fabrics/networks, efficient storage and low-latency computing. OFS is free and is included in major Linux distributions, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2012. In addition to developing and supporting this RDMA software, the Alliance delivers training, workshops and interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multivendor enterprise requirements for security, reliability and efficiency. For more information about the OFA, visit www.openfabrics.org.

InfiniBand (TM/SM) is a trademark and service mark of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Other names and brands are the property of their respective owners.