Voltaire intros Open MPI accelerator s/w

HAMBURG, GERMANY: Voltaire Ltd., provider of scale-out data center fabrics, today announced Open MPI Accelerator (OMA) software that significantly increases the performance of Open MPI-based applications in server and storage environments by nearly 30 percent.

Voltaire OMA works transparently over any interconnect technology that works with Open MPI, including InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). It improves inter- and intra-node communication by freeing up intra-node resources resulting in faster performance for leading HPC applications.

This can translate to greater productivity and time-to-market for companies in industries ranging from manufacturing, oil and gas, research, weather and government that rely on HPC applications to meet their business objectives.

Voltaire has conducted benchmark tests with OMA and several leading commercial HPC applications based on Open MPI. One of these benchmarks revealed that Voltaire OMA improves performance of OpenFOAM tutorial benchmarks by as much as 28 percent.

This is in addition to running popular micro-benchmarks such as MPI OSU and IMB (Pallas). Voltaire OMA integrates seamlessly with Open MPI and requires no special tuning to achieve the desired performance improvements.

“In an economic climate of shrinking IT budgets, Voltaire OMA enables customers to get even greater performance out of their existing Open MPI-based infrastructures and delivers an almost immediate return on investment for intensive HPC environments,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire.

Somekh added, “Customers operating either InfiniBand or 10GbE for their server and storage connectivity can now use software to get an extra boost of performance for their business-critical applications.”

“Voltaire OMA enables significantly improved performance of Open MPI on servers based on the AMD Opteron processor,” said Mike Moore, director, software development engineering, AMD. “The exceptional performance boost helps AMD customers quickly solve significant technical problems without needing any special tuning or changes to the existing infrastructure.”

“After a very short period we started enjoying the benefits of Voltaire OMA which shortened our CFD runtime by double-digit numbers,” said Dr. Andreas Findling, product line manager, NEC.

Voltaire’s extensive experience and knowledge in MPI and in Open MPI development over the past five years, as well as its leadership in the HPC market, makes OMA an ideal performance boosting add-in for the community-grown Open MPI framework.