Our next presenter is going to be Michael Kagan from Mellanox.
Is Michael here?
Okay, great. Fantastic.
And then that will be followed by Martin Hilpman of Dell and Ken Claffey from Zyrotechs.
Okay.
Michael, are you ready?
Yep.
Your presentation time starts now.
Great. Okay, so I'm Michael Kagan.
I am CTO and one of the co-founders of Mellanox.
And Mellanox is the leading provider of storage and server interconnects.
We have started our public appearance in the high-performance computing space nine years ago.
It was in 2003 where we debuted with the first supercomputer based on Mellanox technology from the Virginia Tech.
And since then, there was three entries in that year.
And since then, the presence of our technology at the top 500 list has grown up by a factor of 10.
As of today, InfiniBand is the number one interconnect on the top 500 list.
Actually, this time we surpassed the Internet.
So we started in the high-performance computing and we are leading with the technology all the way through.
We have introduced the FDR, 56 gigabit per second, technology last year.
And from two installations last year, it's now 21 FDR installations in the high-performance computing.
So the high-performance computing technology basically waterfalls down to the commercial and enterprise space.
As you're probably all aware of, Oracle is basically basing their exa-logic and exa-scale solutions on the InfiniBand technology integrated within their systems.
We are a fairly dominant interconnect supplier for the back-end storage.
EMC through the Izela acquisition is one of our storage customers.
And actually NetApp that used to be network appliance 10 years ago was our first customer for the back-end clustering interconnect.
Going to the left-hand side of the slide, it's not just sort of, you know, embedded backside solutions.
It's also enterprise in the web 2.0 and cloud.
The high-performance technology goes down there and we are getting to the web 2.0.2 and cloud installations.
There are multiple companies in this space.
We are working with Microsoft Bing Maps clusters.
Our data centers are built based on our technology.
So in terms of what we are providing, we are providing the silicon cards, boxes, cables, and last but not least software, both in the network and management software on the network and value etc. on the network as well as on the host.
One of the key ingredients to get to the scalability and to the performance is what we call co-design architecture for scalable high-performance solutions.
What we are doing, we are working together with our partners on the application software side to make sure that the value that we have in our hardware is exposed to the software and the value that we design in our hardware can be used by the software.
So effectively we have removed the bottleneck in the communication and as of today the remote access and local access are the cost in terms of performance, bandwidth, and latency of the remote access versus local access are in about the same order of magnitude versus, you know, three or four orders of magnitude as of 10 years ago which enables to approach the application in a very different manner.
We have done co-design with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and we have developed core direct technology for offloading the network based on the MPI operations.
We also have done work with our friends from Seattle and recently Microsoft introduced file storage solutions which are way above and faster than anything else around there.
So in terms of what we have seen, the scalable HPC, the Palace Barrier Benchmark run on the FDR using the offloads that we have designed into the Nix and using the Mellanox software layer that actually enables to expose these offloads to the software.
What you see basically the scalability is much better using the FCA versus not using the FCA.
We have talked about the FDR technology, 56 gigabit.
Another area we are looking at and we have some demo in the booth is making GPU to network interface much more efficient.
And last but not least we are introducing ConnectIB which is the next corner store in the exascale path.
It is the fastest new generation of our host channel adapter delivering 100 gigabit per second throughput from the host to the network running at about 130 million hardware messages per second.
And using the Novell dynamically connected transport service basically increases the scalability, pretty much unlimited internal scalability so the resources used on the host are not dependent on the cluster size.
That's about it.
Thank you very much.
Okay, Michael, you are on the hot seat.
We discussed earlier Intel buying interconnect assets including InfiniBand assets from QLogic.
So are you competing with Intel now?
Okay, so before getting to this intercompeting with us on the interconnect is first of all the fact that Intel bought interconnect technologies and that's actually more than one recently.
I think it signifies the fact that interconnect becomes more and more important ingredient in the computing.
And so before talking about the competition I would like to emphasize the fact that actually it's not that we are fighting on some pie.
This pie is getting much bigger now.
Now in terms of competing with Intel in this industry pretty much everybody competes with everyone.
We have been competing with Intel if you will from the day one.
Intel used to have InfiniBand technology and actually they had their InfiniBand chip out one day before we had our first chip out.
So we lost bet to Intel that we actually bet who is going to be first.
But so far we are doing well and I believe that we will maintain our leadership in the interconnect.
And so far we have been very good partners with Intel.
Intel is a great partner of us and I believe it's going to be the same competition as it used to be before.
Okay, well good answer to that question.
So on one of your slides you talked about co-design architecture for scalable HPC.
So what specific elements are actually being co-designed and who is doing that work?
Okay, so specific elements that we have co-designed and introduced is what's sort of name is collective offloads.
Basically you can run the collective offloads within the network without interfering with the CPU.
So what's called OS noise is much less interfering with the collective operation.
We have architected this jointly with the Oak Ridge National Lab.
And it's now in the full production and through the acquisition of Voltaire we are also extending the software support.
So this basic technology that's sort of the first implementation and usage is for MPI collectives.
It's actually going too much further.
So the co-design is more like a partnership between you and a customer probably.
That's right. It's a partnership between us and either customer or partner like Microsoft.
Very good. Next question.
Infiniband does very well in traditional high performance computing markets.
What's it going to take to see Infiniband get adopted more outside of traditional HPTC?
Yeah, well, I think this question is a little bit outdated.
It's pretty much outside of the HPC today with the Oracle, AMC, NetApp, and Microsoft Bing Maps.
We do the research. I assure you the penetration of Infiniband is much lower outside traditional HPC than it is within HPC.
Well, you know, first of all that everything is open outside the HPC.
The second, yes, you know, once it gets to the HPC then it waterfalls down.
The enterprise and storage markets are much more conservative adapting new technologies.
But, you know, I think we are getting there.
Very good. Okay.
You know, talking to this point, when our friend from Super Micro was asked whether Infiniband will stay premedominant on the HPC,
you said Infiniband is a very important interconnect in the HPC and Ethernet is still important.
Okay. So this is your secret question. You haven't seen this.
And since you talk about Infiniband, and I know Infiniband is your main line of business,
you're very busy. You had everything in their web, 2.0, cloud, HPC, storage, database.
So is IB for everything, for all of IT? And what areas would not be covered by IB?
Well, you know, first of all there is no reason not to cover everything in IT. Would I be so?
If you ask me, yes, we recommend for IT that, you know, people use IT not only just to run their business,
but also as competitive advantage in their business. And those customers, those people that really see IT as a competitive advantage
are going to the Infiniband. Again, you know, just for unlikely case that Ethernet will stay around,
we introduced what we called virtual protocol interconnect technology.
So basically we deliver a lot of things that we deliver on the Infiniband on the application layer.
We can do it on the Ethernet link layer, so people that are running Ethernet networks
and they want to stay with the Ethernet network still can use our technology.
Death to Ethernet, I love it. Last question, what needs to be done with Infiniband to make it a viable exascale interconnect?
Well, I think Infiniband is a viable exascale interconnect. Basically, we are on the way to the exascale altogether.
We work with our partners on both software and hardware side.
Nothing needs to be done with it. It's ready to go now.
Well, when you see the ConnectIB capabilities on the feature set, you will see there's a fairly significant step was done there to the exascale.
Basically, we have a new architecture that enables unlimited internal scalability, which used to be sort of cornerstone on the way to the exascale.
And I think that what needs to be done is to introduce more efficient way of managing compute services.
And I think it's about time to get hypervisors.
And you think it's robust and stable for exascale?
Yes, it is.
Very good. Thank you very much. You're off the line.