White Papers

5 Dell HPC Omni-Path Fabric: Supported Architecture and Application Study June 2016
Executive Summary
In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), servers with high-speed interconnects play a key role in the pursuit
to achieve exascale performance. Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) is the latest addition to the interconnect universe
and is a part of Intel Scalable System framework. It is based on innovations from Intel’s True Scale technology, Cray’s
Aries interconnect, internal Intel
®
IP and from several other open source platforms. This paper provides an overview of
the OPA technology, its features, Dell’s support and walks through the OPA software ecosystem. It dwells into the
performance aspects of OPA ranging from micro benchmarks to many commonly used HPC applications (both
proprietary and open source) at a 32 node (~900 core) scale. To summarize the experience, the learning curve for OPA
wasn’t steep because of its roots in True Scale architecture and it satisfies the low latency and high bandwidth
requirements needed for HPC applications.
A big thank you to our team members Nishanth Dandapanthula, Alex Filby and Munira Hussain for their day-to-day
effort assisting with the setup and configurations necessary for this paper , and we would like to thank James Erwin from
Intel who has been helping us through our journey with Omni-Path.
Audience
This document is intended for people who are interested in learning about the key features and application performance
of the new Intel
®
Omni-Path Fabric technology.