InfiniPath scales incredibly well with CPU core count
Utilizing AMD's HyperTransport, InfiniPath outferforms other systems
PathScale's new PCI Express InfiniPath adapter
High-speed clustering on 10Gbit InfiniBand proves superior on AMD platforms
During IDF, we had the pleasant experience of being able to speak with
PathScale, a company with products that are shaping the landscape of
high-speed networking and communications for clustering environments.
These applications include biotech research, space research,
large-scale 3D rendering and any other high-level computational
applications.
Greg Lindahl, PathScale's Distinguished Engineer,
spoke to us about some of the company's controllers, specifically its
InfiniPath controller, which is a 10Gbit/sec InfiniBand interconnect
capable of scaling its performance depending on the number of CPU cores
in a system. PathScale says that while other controllers are limited to
2 to 4 million messages (small packets of data), a single PathScale
controller is capable of transmitting up to 10 million messages a
second, providing the industry’s best InfiniBand performance.
Quick specifications:
- 1.29 Microseconds MPI Latency (0-byte, 1/2 round trip)
- 88 byte message size to achieve 1/2 of peak bandwidth (streaming, 8 CPU cores)
- 954 MB/s peak uni-directional bandwidth (streaming)
- 1884 MB/s peak bi-directional bandwidth (streaming)
- 583 MB/s TCP/IP throughput with 6.7 microsecond latency with a standard Linux stack
- 8.2 million messages/sec (four CPU cores per adapter)
- 3.3 million messages/sec (one CPU core per adapter)
Currently,
PathScale delivers its controllers in two formats: a PCI Express
InfiniBand adapter and another that interfaces with AMD's
HyperTransport. With PCI Express, PathScale says that customers will
get better performance than the competition but performance will still
be capped to the interface limitations of PCI Express. PathScale tells
us that if enterprise board developers use its InfiniPath controller
on a HyperTransport interface, performance will at least double that of
the best PCI Express systems. Even better yet, multi-core Opterons
coupled with HyperTransport will give the best performance available.
Lloyd
Dickman, PathScale’s Distinguished Architect, tells us that not only
does InfiniBand performance receive benefits, but high-speed clustering
applications will realize the best performance utilizing an AMD
platform. This claim comes as no surprise since Google, and several
well established universities are already utilizing AMD platforms for
their most demanding applications.
Lindahl left us with a few
details about how PathScale's product scale well with more cores and
while he said that the technique was conceptualized more than a decade
ago, utilizing AMD's HyperTransport allows PathScale to fully
capitalize on multi-core systems. Lindahl says that even on an 8-way
Xeon system, a PCI Express InfiniPath adapter is unable to tap the full
potential of all 8 cores simply because it must communicate through a
single Northbridge chip. Lindahl said that while Intel has an answer to
AMD's HyperTransport, it is unavailable and there is no set
announcement date.
More about PathScale's InfiniPath products can be found here.
The company also links to independent benchmarks sources which utilize
systems that contain up to 512 physical CPUs (Opterons).
“So far we have not seen a single Android device that does not infringe on our patents." -- Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith
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