Sponsored Moving more bits across a copper wire or optical cable at a lower cost per bit shifted has been the dominant driver of datacenter networking since distributed systems were first developed more than three decades ago. …
The InfiniBand interconnect emerged from the ashes of a fight about the future of server I/O at the end of the last millennium, and instead of becoming that generic I/O it became a low latency, high bandwidth interconnect used for high performance computing. …
It is always good to have options when it comes to optimizing systems because not all software behaves the same way and not all institutions have the same budgets to try to run their simulations and models on HPC clusters. …
If this is the middle of November, even during a global pandemic, this must be the SC20 supercomputing conference and there either must be a speed bump that is being previewed for the InfiniBand interconnect commonly used for HPC and AI or it is actually shipping in systems. …
People in the modern era sometimes forget that networking predates the rise of Cisco Systems and the commercialization of the Internet. …
Mellanox got its start as one of the several suppliers of ASICs for the low latency InfiniBand protocol that was originally conceived as a kind of universal fabric to connect all devices in the datacenter. …
For decades, the IT market has been obsessed with the competition between suppliers of processors, but there are rivalries between the makers of networking chips and the full-blown switches that are based on them that are just as intense. …
When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. …
InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. …
If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling. …
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