Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/19/mellanox_infiniband_csiro/

Mellanox to provide InfiniBand for CSIRO super

From switches down to cables

By Richard Chirgwin

Posted in HPC, 19th June 2012 23:28 GMT

Mellanox is to supply the InfiniBand infrastructure for Australia's national science agency CSIRO’s new supercomputer cluster being delivered by XENON Systems.

In April, CSIRO, announced the contract for a 134-node, 390-GPU, 268-CPU cluster that the research agency expects will deliver 120 Teraflops performance when installed.

The Mellanox win covers its SwitchX switches, ConnectX adapters, a fabric management system and cables. The company says scalability and low power consumption were key to the contract. CSIRO says the infrastructure upgrade is driven by the demands of the agency’s new Intel architecture.

The top-100 system – which is also a top-20 placeholder in the supercomputing “green list” – serves CSIRO and other research agencies such as the Australian Synchotron in Melbourne.

CSIRO has previously told The Register that the system supports hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research activities.

“We needed to upgrade our interconnect solution for better performance, scalability and return on investment,” said Brian Davis, ASC Cluster Services Manager at CSIRO. “This technology helps to ensure our users will have a high performance level for their research and development.” ®