Ted H. Kim's Weblog

Thursday February 07, 2008

Using IB for world records

Here are some recent blog entries featuring Sun hardware using InfiniBand in action. In each case, InfiniBand is being used with Sun hardware to challenge for world records.

• More Ranger Facts and Figures gives a run down on the stats for the huge TACC installation which includes 62,976 CPU cores in the system. We won't know how it places on the Top500 until June.

• A trio of stories about world record benchmarks using Sun gear connected by InfiniBand: ABAQUS v6.7,   EXA PowerFLOW,   Fluent.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2008-02-07 17:42:17.0) Permalink

DDR Patch

Back when we came out with our first Solaris HCA driver, InfiniBand only had what is now called single data rate (SDR). Now the situation is different. Not only are double (DDR) and quad (QDR) rates spec'ed for IB, DDR is common out in the customer base. To address this, we have fixes that are going to be released in the next update of Solaris 10, which means they are also in OpenSolaris already. But to get it out faster, the fixes are also being pushed out in official Solaris patches.

So if you have a DDR capable HCA that runs our "tavor" driver, try out the patch (sparc: 126647-02, x86: 126648-02). Of course, remember to be sure your switch is configured for DDR too. Folks using Sun Connection Update Manager should have seen these come out already in the patch stream. BTW, if you are wondering about the "arbel" driver, these fixes are already in our recently released InfiniBand Updates 1.

I should also mention that this patch contains some other fixes which improve our uDAPL performance (used by Sun's MPI implementation in ClusterTools) as well as other fixes which might be of interest to our Solaris IB users. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: InfiniBand

(2008-02-07 17:13:11.0) Permalink