According to the Top 500 Website, the last iteration of the list had just three sites reporting specific InfiniBand links: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and
Virginia Tech.
In contrast, most other sites reported using proprietary interconnections from the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), as well as so-called openly available solutions from Myricom Inc., Quadrics, and others. A substantial number of sites -- a keyword search produced 50 -- list Ethernet as part of the setup.
Of the world's five largest supercomputing sites (Japan's Earth Simultator Center, Los Alamos, Virginia Tech, NCSA, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), two, Los Alamos and Virginia Tech, list InfiniBand as an interconnect, though these sites also use other technologies. Foley says more large sites should show up, of which a few will be from the Asia/Pacific region, such as the China Education and Research Grid. He says Asia/Pac sites seem more open to InfiniBand because their infrastructures are relatively new, and participants aren't heavily invested in other technologies.
One InfiniBand competitor begs to differ with this view. Chuck Seitz, CEO and CTO of Myricom, thinks there will still be only a handful of InfiniBand sites (like, five) when the Top 500 rolls out. "They told us a year ago we'd see dozens of InfiniBand sites," he says. "We saw three."
Seitz has his own axe to grind: He claims there were 194 Myrinet-equipped sites in last November's Top 500, including 73 right from his company, plus another 121 via a product OEM'd by Hewlett-Packard, namely HP's HyperFabric link for its Superdome supercomputers.
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