Designing High-End Computing Systems with InfiniBand and High-Speed Ethernet

InfiniBand (IB) and High-speed Ethernet (HSE) technologies are generating a lot of excitement towards building next generation High-End Computing (HEC) systems. This tutorial will provide an overview of these emerging technologies, their offered features, their current market standing, and their suitability for prime-time HEC. It will start with a brief overview of IB, HSE, and their architectural features. An overview of the emerging OpenFabrics stack which encapsulates both IB and HSE in a unified manner will be presented. IB and HSE hardware/software solutions and the market trends will be highlighted. Finally, sample performance numbers highlighting the performance these technologies can achieve in different environments will be shown.