Quadrics delivers interconnects for clusters based on Intel Xeon at Penn State University

Penn State has become the latest customer to select Quadrics as a way to gain high-performance computing at an affordable price. Using Quadrics' QsNet high bandwidth, low latency interconnect, Penn State has built Lion-XL, a nearly 1.0 Teraflop machine, with standard components that offer the computation speeds comparable to specialised, and much more expensive, high-performance computers. Quadrics also recently announced its involvement in the fastest Linux cluster in the world, ranked 5 in the Top500, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Quadrics is using these clusters to gain further endorsement of its QsNet products, which have been, and still are, used in proprietary cluster SMP systems, as the leading high performance network supplier for commodity based clusters as well. Investment in commodity based Supercluster systems as opposed to traditional supercomputers can significantly reduce the overall cost of ownership for an organisation.

Penn State's Vijay Agarwala, director of graduate education and research services, stated that "Quadrics is a major vendor of high-speed interconnect technology, a crucial element in building scalable and well-balanced computational cluster. Instead of researchers deploying small clusters in their offices, it's far more productive to build larger machines. Larger machines, when properly run, significantly lower the cost of ownership."

"Working with organisations like Penn State will provide Quadrics valuable feedback on the optimisation of Quadrics cluster operation for academia and provide opportunities for similar organisations to gain insight into the benefits of the Quadrics environment", stated Drazen Stilinovic, General Manager of Quadrics Limited.

Quadrics' scalable, high performance solutions combine QsNet interconnect with standard microprocessor and operating system platforms. QsNet enables large clusters of these processing units to be connected together. With extremely high bandwidth and ultra-low latency, it is a crucial component for building scalable systems.

Quadrics QsNet is now supported on a range of microprocessor platforms under Linux consisting of Intel Xeon and Itanium2, HP Alpha, and AMD Athlon together with Quadrics' customised implementations with HP Tru64 Unix for the HP AlphaServer SC. QsNet performance, for the Dell Xeon nodes ranges from 1.8 us latency to over 320 Mbytes/sec bandwidth. Combining multiple QsNet host adaptors, Quadrics can also provide even more bandwidth if needed. The Quadrics next generation network, QsNet 2, based on PCI-X and available in 2003, will maintain Quadrics' technology leadership in high-performance interconnect in this arena.

Performance alone, however, is only part of the picture. Quadrics' unique solution lies in combining the performance of QsNet with a software environment to ensure that clusters spanning thousands of processors can be used, administered and run effectively. This combination provides the critical production capability for cluster-driven computing.