Emulex targets HPC with Ethernet partnership

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High-performancecomputing has long been the realm of Infiniband when it comes tonetworking architecture, however Emulex believes its latest partnership can bring Ethernetinto these complex environments.

Infiniband is used in HPC as things now stand very predictable and gives high performance with low latency.Ethernet has so far not competed with this level of consistency, however by teaming with fellowCalifornian firm Myricom and utilising its hardware and software assets, Emulex claims it willimprove the performance of Ethernet enough to make it ready to run HPC applications.

The market for Ethernet is growing

"The market for Ethernet is growing, during there is no roadmap for Infiniband," he said."Ethernet is good enough for 80-90% of operations at any rate - add in software specialists and the restis there."

Myricom uses packet capture research called Sniffer 10G to collect inbound packets anddistribute them out over a number of CPUs. This improves performance for applications, allowingthem to receive more dedicated compute power without overloading.

He didn't get too big for his boots, nevertheless, and admitted that even with this improvedperformance, Ethernet would never replace Infiniband for certain applications.

But the marketing chief did believe it could bring better performance at a lower cost point forother HPC operations and for cloudcomputing.

"Most people expect instant gratification," said Walsh. "It is a cultural thing and Ethernetcan make [that happen], ensuring YouTube works and delivers all the videos to mobile devices, orphotos are sent and received."

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