Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has announced that Mellanox interconnect solutions accelerate the world's fastest supercomputer, at the supercomputing centre in Wuxi, China.

The new number one supercomputer delivers 93 Petaflops (three times higher compared to the previous top system), connecting nearly 41 thousand nodes and more than ten million CPU cores. The offloading architecture of the Mellanox interconnect solution is the key to providing world leading performance, scalability and efficiency, connecting the highest number of nodes and CPU cores within a single supercomputer.

Mellanox's InfiniBand solutions now accelerate 45 Petascale systems, nearly 50 percent of the world Petascale-performance systems on the TOP500 list, 1.6 times more than the closest competitor.

With the release of the new smart InfiniBand solutions, ConnectX-5 adapters and Switch-IB2 switch systems, and the expected release of 200G HDR InfiniBand in 2017, Mellanox InfiniBand-based Exascale technology will continue to enable supercomputing leadership across applications and geographies. Value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited distributes Mellanox solutions throughout southern Africa.

"InfiniBand technology has been accelerating multiple generations of the world's fastest supercomputers due to its performance, efficiency, scalability, robustness, and proven and standards-based leadership. Mellanox enabled the first Petaflop system in 2008, and now enables the world's first 100 Petaflop supercomputer," says Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. "The world-wide demand for higher performance and faster real-time data analytics, requires smart interconnect solutions that deliver high data speeds, as well as open, standards-based technology to ensure backward and future compatibility for our applications. Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions deliver data speeds from 10 to 100Gb/s, offloading the CPU to enable the highest data centre return on investment and lowest cost of ownership. As we plan to introduce 200 and 400Gb/s solutions next year, Mellanox will continue to enable faster and more efficient high-performance computing, cloud, web2.0, database, deep learning and storage platforms."

The TOP500 supercomputer list has evolved to include both high-performance computing systems as well as cloud and Web2.0 Hyperscale infrastructures, mainly from the Asia-Pacific region. For the high-performance computing systems on the list, InfiniBand continues to demonstrate its technology leadership accelerating 70 percent of the systems. Overall, InfiniBand connects 41.2 percent of the TOP500 systems.

Mellanox's interconnect offloading architecture enables the most efficient system on the TOP500 list. Offloading architecture becomes more critical with the usage of accelerators and higher scale. InfiniBand enabled 53 percent higher system efficiency, higher system utilisation and lower cost compared to Omni-Path. Additional comparisons demonstrated an average of 45 percent higher system performance at 25 percent lower cost per application performance in a recent HPC CPAR (cost per application rating) benchmark review.

"Our southern African customers have access to the Mellanox product line, offering their business thehighest throughput and lowest latency of any Ethernet interconnect solution – meaning faster data delivery and better system and application performance. It's true technology innovation for high-performance computing and data centre connectivity," adds Anton Jacobsz, managing director at Networks Unlimited.

Published twice a year and publicly available at: www.top500.org, the TOP500 list ranks the world's most powerful computer systems according to the Linpack benchmark rating system. A detailed TOP500 presentation can be found here: www.mellanox.com/page/top_500