Dell, whose coming "modular" computers will incorporate InfiniBand, is testing InfiniBand clusters in its labs as an option for high-performance computing, the company said. Other companies are also getting involved, many of them announcing their plans at the SC2002 conference this week. Among them are Paceline Systems and InfiniSwitch, which make high-speed switches to connect InfiniBand-enabled devices. Paceline announced a promotional kit for high-performance computing customers and an agreement with Abba Technologies to sell its hardware to supercomputer customers. Paceline supercomputer customers include Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Washington. Paceline also is working with a smaller company, MPI Software Technology, to create a version of crucial Beowulf software for InfiniBand clusters. That software, called the Message Passing Interface (MPI), is an open-source program that governs how data is exchanged between different computers with their own memory. MPI Software Technology sells a commercial version of the program called MPI/Pro. The starter kit costs $9,995 (about £6,400) for a system with a Paceline 4100 switch, four adapter cards so servers can be connected, the MPI/Pro software and cables. Evaluation units are available now, with general availability scheduled for February 2003. A start-up called Topspin Communications is using InfiniBand networking processors from Mellanox to build a 72-port InfiniBand switch. TopSpin, which wants to reach mainstream commercial customers as well as supercomputer buyers, also is working with MPI Software Technology. Its hardware is used in the cluster in Los Alamos. The Los Alamos system uses 128 dual-Xeon computers from Promicro Systems. Another company trying to benefit from the supercomputing market is JNI, which makes InfiniBand cards that plug into servers. The company announced two new cards -- one using Mellanox chips and the other using IBM chips -- each with two InfiniBand ports. MPI Software Technology supports the cards, JNI said.
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