Cisco and HP launch HPC assault

HP and Cisco Systems have announced a partnership to target the high-performance computing (HPC) market. 

HP will offer Cisco's double data rate (DDR) InfiniBand-based Server Fabric Switches as part of its Unified Cluster portfolio.

A second agreement will see HP's BladeSystem c-Class servers supported by Cisco's InfiniBand host driver software.

The companies hope that the deals will accelerate business growth for HPC environments by providing high bandwidth, low latency, fabric stability and scalability.

HPC configurations are used for projects requiring millions of simultaneous calculations, such as financial data analysis, data mining, market data analysis, computational chemistry, database tiers and computational fluid dynamics.

"HP is pleased to add the Cisco DDR InfiniBand switches to our Unified Cluster Portfolio," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager of the HPC division at HP.

"The Cisco switches fit well with HP's scalable solutions for high-performance computation, data management and visualisation, and our continuing focus on innovation, choice and performance for our HPC customers."

The Cisco InfiniBand HPC drivers work with the HP 4X DDR IB Mezzanine Host Channel Adapters within BladeSystem c-Class blade servers.

The c-Class systems are connected with 20Gbps per line rate InfiniBand uplinks to SFS 7000 series InfiniBand fixed and modular switching chassis as part of larger InfiniBand HPC clusters.

In turn, these clusters enable high performance and scalability for message-passing distributed-parallel applications with all the advantages of the HP BladeSystem.

The Cisco SFS DDR InfiniBand switches range from a 24-port fixed chassis configuration up to a 288-port modular chassis.

The HP 4X DDR IB Mezzanine interface card, now bundled with Cisco InfiniBand drivers, enables HP BladeSystem c-Class servers to use Cisco Linux-based Commercial IB fabrics, Cisco Linux-based Open Fabrics Enterprise Edition IB fabrics and Cisco Windows-based IB fabrics.

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