INFINIBAND AND SPEED OF WORLD SUPERCOMPUTERS

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – In simplest terms, a supercomputer can complete many more calculations per second than the standard computer.

Supercomputers have come a long way since the CDC 7600 (from 1969 to 1975, Control Data Corp’s CDC 7600 was considered the world’s fastest computer, running at 36 megahertz. An iPhone 7, by contrast, runs at 2.33 gigahertz—nearly 100 times as fast as the 7600 http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/seymour-cray-the-man-who-brought-style-to-supercomputers).

Today’s supercomputers are extremely powerful and are even billed to change the way we live in the future –for instance, by advancing biological modelling, making predictions, such as global warming, and creating virtual universes through solving complex scientific problems with mathematics.

Putting today’s supercomputers into perspective is April Laser. The reporter stated in June 2017 in recode.net: “These computers process at petascale speeds, meaning their capabilities are measured in terms of one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. To put that in perspective, consumer laptops now operate at gigascale, which is one billion calculations per second.”

Supercomputers can be found around the globe, but some are more powerful than others. The latest TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world was released in Germany on 21 June 2017, revealing that China currently holds the top two supercomputer spots, followed by Switzerland in third position and then the US – holding the next three spots.

The fastest computer in Africa was unveiled last year at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, and is named Lengau, which means cheetah in Setswana. It is accelerated by Mellanox InfiniBand solutions.

“What we found to be of particular note in the TOP500 list, is that InfiniBand accelerated the majority of new systems on this supercomputer list,” says Anton Jacobsz, managing director of African value-added distributor company, Networks Unlimited.

He adds that Networks Unlimited became a distribution partner of Mellanox last year to ensure that its Southern African customers have access to the Mellanox product line, which offers the market’s highest performing end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions provider for servers and storage.

“Our partnership with Mellanox has boosted our strategy to provide the southern African market with true technology innovation. We are especially proud to offer the continent solutions from a company that develops technology that drives the world’s the world’s most powerful computer systems,” says Jacobsz.

He highlights that InfiniBand accelerates 60 percent of the total high performance computing systems on the TOP500 list and 48 percent of the petaflop infrastructures, an increase from 45 percent as reported in the previous TOP500 list.

“InfiniBand’s In-Networking Computing offload advantage delivers the highest application performance, scalability and robustness, enabling users to maximise their data centre return on investment. In just six months, EDR InfiniBand systems have more than doubled on the TOP500 list, and InfiniBand was chosen by far more end-users compared to a proprietary offering, maintaining its market share.

“In addition, InfiniBand adoption continues to ramp up in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning platforms, becoming the natural choice for these solutions,” stated Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies shortly after the June 2017 TOP500 list was published. “We are also happy to see more of our 10, 40 and 100G Ethernet solutions on the TOP500 list, resulting in 192 systems using Mellanox interconnect solutions.

Finally, we plan to release our next generation 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand solutions later this year, further increasing the technology advantage of Mellanox, for high-performance computing, cloud, Web2.0, database, deep learning and compute and storage platforms.”