He says Intel's decision to not produce the InfiniBand silicon and cards itself worried him temporarily -- but he says the company reassured him that, although it's not developing the technology in-house, it continues to support all the startups that are developing it.
"Intel realized that InfiniBand was expensive to develop and would not replace TCP/IP in the data center, but would instead find its place in high-performance computing applications," Lifka says. "It is not the Ethernet replacement they had hoped it would be."
According to Lifka, 10-Gigabit Ethernet doesn't offer the kind of low latency his applications require. Some of Cornell's largest customers are automotive companies for which CTC does crash-test simulations and design analysis. These applications run on parallel clusters and require high bandwidth and low latency, he says. The maximum latency in an InfiniBand cluster is approximately 10 microseconds; Ethernet is an order of magnitude greater than that because of the burdensome requirements of processing TCP/IP.
CTC's InfiniBand project will include 16 of its Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) 2650 servers at the research center's Manhattan site. The goal over time is to deploy it on 128 dual-processor Xeon servers at CTC's main site upstate in Ithaca, N.Y. "The project starts out at Manhattan, and when we are happy with it and need to scale up, we'll move it to Ithaca," says Lifka.
As these kinds of deployments roll out, the industry can safely assume InfiniBand has found its market.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
