40G and 120G active optical cables popular in HPCs will likely spread to the data center.

By Brad Smith, Sr. Vice President and Lead Analyst, LightCounting, LLC.

Today, 80% of the Top500 HPCs use the Intel/AMD Bus architecture, additionally 37% of the Top500 HPC use InfiniBand as the high-speed interconnect of choice with AOCs gaining more ground.

The 22nd Super Computer Conference (SC09) held on November 14-20, 2009 in Portland, OR was the must see conference for InfiniBand and AOCs technologies. Carrying our "Cluster for Dummies" book and interviewing the leading AOC players, LightCounting was there to uncover what all the hype was about first hand. The SC09 conference coverage of products and vendors will be discussed in its new upcoming AOCs report.

In the past, SC09 was the archetypical "nerd show" complete with fuzzy beards and pocket protectors. Now, brimming with "suits" and 204 miles of fiber in The Oregon Convention Center, the show boasts 318 exhibits and 10,100 conference attendees (with 71 countries represented), according to SCO9 show management. The six-day conference was capped off with a speech given by former vice-president Al Gore on Global Warming playing off weather simulation -- a key applications for HPCs. In his speech, he stated that there are three schools of logic - inductive logic, deductive logic and "supercomputer logic" and the later will change the world in ways never imagined.

Supercomputers or High Performance Computers (HPCs) once only found the realm of the national defense labs and costing approximately $20M, can now be purchased for <$15K, and resembles a large desktop PC, affordable by many small companies. Today, 80% of the Top500 HPCs use the Intel/AMD Bus architecture, additionally 37% of the Top500 HPC use InfiniBand as the high-speed interconnect of choice with AOCs gaining more ground. HPC rack servers offer essentially the same technologies as that found in the data center. [Intel/AMD microprocessors with 8-12 cores, 385G of DRAM, SATA disk drives.] The main difference being is "how" the servers are connected to share memory; InfiniBand is favored in high-speed applications and 1G Gigabit Ethernet copper is preferred in cost-sensitive environments.

Infiniband has typically been viewed as the "other" interconnect, but when technology becomes integrated onto the PC motherboard it's instantly validated as "mainstream". PC motherboard suppliers such as Asustek, MSI, and SuperMicro introduced a 8-12 core dual, microprocessor server motherboards, dual Nvidia Fermi graphics processors (sporting 3B transistors) with dual InfiniBand QDR QSFP integrated into the motherboard and dedicated 16x slots for 80G throughput. HPCs are not only rapidly becoming pervasive in standard configurations and software packages they're now affordable. Computer and graphically intense jobs that would take a week to compute can now be done by lunch.

SC09 was interconnected with its 200 miles of optical fiber and AOCs, where 4x QDR AOCs were everywhere as server interconnects and 12x as switch connects. Finisar introduced a hybrid 12x CXP with 3xQSFP bridging the two MSAs. Mellanox introduced 120G InfiniBand switching systems using CXPs. Sun Microsystems showed off their Constellation system -- aptly named, with 3456 12X CXP ports. KOI, HP, LSI, Microsoft and RAID Inc., also demonstrated CXP interconnect technology. Molex introduced a unique AOC based on 1060-nm VCS;ELs at 1 km reach. Luxtera announced its third gen silicon photonics showing a lower power AOC and SNAP12. Avago introduced their long-anticipated 4x10G. AlpenIO demonstrated a 4x10G AOC with a core technology looking similar to that of Intel's LightPeak. Several more vendors are expected to enter the parallel optic transceiver and AOC business in the next few months with announcements expected at OFC/NFOEC 2010.

"This show touted of so many 40G and 120G interconnects that it made the 1G Ethernet data centers look like is was stuck in the last century," observed Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and Lead Analyst at LightCounting. "AOCs bridge the gap between copper and optical interconnects, given the price points and low operating expenses it will expedite the adoption of other optical products such as parallel 40GbE, 100GbE, 16G Fibre Channel and 12G SAS into the data center."

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