QLogic a Major Influence as Supercomputers Race Ahead

The 38^thedition of the Top 500 Supercomputer List provided some revealing insights into the networking layer of the most powerful supercomputers running today, an area where InfiniBand solutions, a notable portion of which is provided by QLogic, are moving forward. QLogic and a fresh Wikibon study have pulled some interesting data, in addition to providing an observation of some emerging trends in this area.

Thirty-eight percent of the top 500 with a MPP architecture are powered by InfiniBand, while 98 percent of the clustered supercomputers that made it to the list ran either on InfiniBand or Gigabit Ethernet. This, along with even stronger statistics among the top 100 supercomputers, refute the notion that Gigabit is becoming a dominant interconnect fabric, Wikibon’s David Floyer explained.

“The fastest systems requiring the lowest latency and high bandwidth, InfiniBand and Customer/Proprietary interconnects dominate. Indeed, the only trend shown in Figures 1 and 2 is a slight increase towards Custom/Proprietary interconnects, as new ideas are tried out, particularly in MPP systems. Innovation is still alive and well.

In high performance systems and arrays, InfiniBand has become more prevalent.”

The InfiniBand solutions used in these deployments originated either from Mellanox or QLogic, for the most part. Three of the speediest 100 supercomputers are running on QLogic’s TrueScale solution as of November, and a total of 12 percent of the top 500 have incorporated QLogic networking, according to the company.

Supercomputers are another frontier where performance is ramping up the competition, and on the international level, only continues to increase. The area is also expanding on another front, thanks to innovations driven by providers such as Amazon Web Services, which made a new supercomputer-scale instance available not too long ago.

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BenHPCSmith 5 pts

QLogic a Major Influence? really? in our world??

QLogic has only around 10% market share in the InfiniBand world, their competitor is the only one with FDR, and their competitor is also the only one with IB in petascale systems. Doing some homework before writing a blog is well recommended…

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rizzn 12 pts moderator

BenHPCSmith Really? What's your source for those statistics? I've heard contradictory numbers.

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It is known to everyone that only Mellanox offers IB FDR and QLogic does not - check their web sites.

All the major Top500 system info is on the web, including vendors - all the IB petascale ones are not based on QLogic.

And last - check the HPC analyst reports - they describe the market share.

Ben

rizzn

BenHPCSmith I did check the latest HPC marketshare reports... I think your numbers may be a bit off. From a cursory glance, it looks like reports range of QLogic's share being at least between 15% to 20%. cc dvellante

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I would assume that each of the market share analysts has a slight different set of numbers, but even at 20%, do you call it "a Major Influence"?

rizzndvellante

BenHPCSmithdvellante Without a doubt I'd call that major influence. The way I understand it, it's Mellanox and QLogic as the last men standing, so to speak. In any market segment where there's two competitors only and both have double digit market share, both have major influence, particularly since their share doesn't appear to be shrinking, but growing.

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QLogic a Major Influence as Supercomputers Race Ahead

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