{"id":14412,"date":"2017-08-24T10:33:09","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T08:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=14412"},"modified":"2017-08-24T10:33:09","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T08:33:09","slug":"infiniband-increases-speed-of-majority-of-worlds-supercomputers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2017\/08\/24\/infiniband-increases-speed-of-majority-of-worlds-supercomputers\/","title":{"rendered":"InfiniBand increases speed of majority of world\u2019s supercomputers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the simplest terms, a supercomputer can complete many more calculations per second than the standard computer. <\/p>\n

Supercomputers have come a long way since the CDC 7600 (from 1969 to 1975, Control Data Corp\u2019s CDC 7600 was considered the world\u2019s fastest computer, running at 36 megahertz. An iPhone 7, by contrast, runs at 2.33 gigahertz \u2013 nearly 100 times as fast as the 7600).<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s supercomputers are extremely powerful and are even billed to change the way we live in the future \u2013 for instance, by advancing biological modelling, making predictions, such as global warming, and creating virtual universes through solving complex scientific problems with mathematics. <\/p>\n

Putting today\u2019s supercomputers into perspective is April Laser. The reporter stated in June 2017 in recode.net: \u201cThese computers process at petascale speeds, meaning their capabilities are measured in terms of one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. To put that in perspective, consumer laptops now operate at gigascale, which is one billion calculations per second.\u201d <\/p>\n

Supercomputers can be found around the globe, but some are more powerful than others. The latest TOP500 list<\/a> of most powerful supercomputers in the world was released in Germany on 21 June 2017, revealing that China currently holds the top two supercomputer spots, followed by Switzerland in third position and then the US, holding the next three spots. <\/p>\n

The fastest computer in Africa was unveiled last year at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, and is named Lengau, which means cheetah in Setswana. It is accelerated by Mellanox InfiniBand solutions. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found to be of particular note in the TOP500 list, is that InfiniBand accelerated the majority of new systems on this supercomputer list,\u201d says Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director of African value-added distributor company, Networks Unlimited. <\/p>\n

He adds that Networks Unlimited became a distribution partner of Mellanox last year to ensure that its southern African customers have access to the Mellanox product line, which offers the market\u2019s highest performing end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions provider for servers and storage. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur partnership with Mellanox has boosted our strategy to provide the southern African market with true technology innovation. We are especially proud to offer the continent solutions from a company that develops technology that drives the world\u2019s the world\u2019s most powerful computer systems,\u201d says Jacobsz. <\/p>\n

He highlights that InfiniBand accelerates 60% of the total high-performance computing systems on the TOP500 list and 48% of the petaflop infrastructures, an increase from 45% as reported in the previous TOP500 list. <\/p>\n

\u201cInfiniBand\u2019s In-Networking Computing offload advantage delivers the highest application performance, scalability and robustness, enabling users to maximise their data centre return on investment. In just six months, EDR InfiniBand systems have more than doubled on the TOP500 list, and InfiniBand was chosen by far more end users compared to a proprietary offering, maintaining its market share. In addition, InfiniBand adoption continues to ramp up in artificial intelligence and deep learning platforms, becoming the natural choice for these solutions,\u201d stated Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are also happy to see more of our 10, 40 and 100G Ethernet solutions on the TOP500 list, resulting in 192 systems using Mellanox interconnect solutions. Finally, we plan to release our next generation 200Gb\/s HDR InfiniBand solutions later this year, further increasing the technology advantage of Mellanox, for high-performance computing, cloud, Web2.0, database, deep learning and compute and storage platforms.\u201d <\/p>\n

To obtain more information on Mellanox solutions available from Networks Unlimited, please contact Chris Coetzee, Product Manager: Mellanox at Networks Unlimited, at chris.coetzee@nu.co.za. \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the simplest terms, a supercomputer can complete many more calculations per second than the standard computer. Supercomputers have come a long way since the CDC 7600 (from 1969 to 1975, Control Data Corp\u2019s CDC 7600 was considered the world\u2019s fastest computer, running at 36 megahertz. An iPhone 7, by contrast, runs at 2.33 gigahertz […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":14413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[275,399,38,19,262],"tags":[385,1956,1957,252,1958],"class_list":["post-14412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-intelligent-technology-newsletter","category-more-news","category-networking","category-regional-news","category-used","tag-africa","tag-lenagu","tag-mellanox-infiniband-solutions","tag-networks-unlimited","tag-supercomputer"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}