The University of Oklahoma developed its OSCER (OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research) high-performance Linux computing cluster to benefit the high-end computing needs of about 500 students, faculty, and staff, both at OU and institutions collaborating with the university. Unlike most supercomputers, OSCER is specifically targeted toward education and direct research support at several different colleges within OU, including the departments of Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Geosciences, and Medicine.
Henry Neeman, director at OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (www.ou.edu), says that a key aspect of supercomputing is the need for lightning-fast communication among a large number of servers. A weather forecast of the continental United States, for example, requires splitting up raw data into four or five chunks, each of which gets analyzed on one of the many servers that make up the supercomputing cluster. But then each of these chunks has to communicate with one another to provide the user with a complete picture of the weather patterns.
“If you have a storm that’s passing from eastern Oklahoma into western Arkansas, there needs to be communication on [the] boundary between Oklahoma and Arkansas,” says Neeman. “It is not so much focused on bandwidth [but] on latency. How long does it take for that first bit to show up?”
Given that the messages that make up the complete picture tend to be very small, OSCER needed an interconnection network among its 534 servers that does not only offer low latency and high bandwidth, but high reliability. OU decided on deploying InfiniBand Networks powered by QLogic (www.qlogic.com), an HPC (high-performance computing) solution that includes QLogic 7200 Series DDR (double data rate) InfiniBand adapters, based on the QLogic TrueScale architecture, and QLogic SilverStorm 9000 Series InfiniBand core and edge switches.
QLogic uses the InfiniBand standard to interconnect high-speed servers in a cluster so they can work together in tandem as fast as possible with as little lag as possible, while at the same time shifting processing loads to prevent failover.
Complete Article: Building A Supercomputer: OU Uses Infiniband Networks Powered By QLogic To Ease Deployment
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