InfiniCon's InfinIO 3000 Switch Series will provide a 10Gbps, full bisectional bandwidth fabric for the 128-node cluster, comprised of Hewlett-Packard's Integrity rx2600 servers with Intel Itanium 2 dual processors. The HPC configuration is expected to yield peak computing performance of more than one trillion floating point calculations per second (TeraFlops).

Eleven schools with a total of 44 departments within Tsinghua University will have access to the computational power of the InfiniBand cluster. In addition, the Tsinghua cluster will be among the initial university sites integrated into the China Education and Research Grid, sponsored by the Ministry of Education. One of the most ambitious Grid projects by a government to date, the Education and Research Grid was launched in October 2003 and will ultimately link more than 200,000 students and faculty members from nearly 100 universities across China, enabling them to share resources and work collaboratively.

"A central mission for Tsinghua is to continually leverage advances in high-speed networking so that we may offer researchers across academia and industry the most powerful computational tools and applications possible", stated Professor Zheng, Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing Technology, Tsinghua University. "The InfiniBand-based switching fabric from InfiniCon and Shanghai Hong Ri equips our university with a high-performance infrastructure that is much more capable of supporting computationally intense education and research projects, and integrates seamlessly into broader, Grid-based environments."

Breakthrough performance and price advantages are increasingly making InfiniBand the interconnect technology of choice for high-speed networking. Its superior bandwidth (up to 30Gbps), ultra-low switching latency across large fabrics, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities combine to accelerate applications running across high performance computing and enterprise environments.