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June 19, 2008 -- Emcore and Mellanox Technologies have joined to provide 20-Gbit/sec InfiniBand interconnect technology for use in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Roadrunner supercomputer, the first High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster to break the Petaflop computing barrier.
Built by IBM and housed at the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer, will be used to analyze national security threats, test nuclear stockpiles, run annual testing of various nuclear weapons systems, and investigate long-term climate change, astronomy and human genome science.
For use in Roadrunner, Emcore supplied its Emcore Connects Cables (ECC), billed as InfiniBand interconnects that operate at 20-Gbit/sec data rates with an extremely low bit error rate of 10(-15). This combination of high performance and excellent reliability led IBM to choose the cables for the supercomputer, says Emcore.
IBM used 55 miles of the ECC optical fiber to build the Roadrunner HPC system. On June 9, the DOE announced that Roadrunner was the first system to break 1,000 trillion calculations per second mark known as the Petaflop.
For its part in providing the supercomputer's underlying fabric technology, Mellanox supplied its ConnectX 20-Gbit/sec InfiniBand adapters and switch systems, which are based on the company's InfiniScale switch silicon.
Also in conjunction with Mellanox, Emcore is demonstrating a 40 Gbit/sec ECC cable at this month's International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
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