Keeping Researchers Connected

New server platforms
The original cluster was replaced with a new
installation running on the Intel® Xeon®
processor 5500 series to provide the level of
compute performance required. To construct
a cluster that was easier and more affordable
to manage, while maximizing performance
and minimizing latency, CERN chose to im-
plement Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server
Adapters as the fabric to connect the cluster.
A simplified networking solution
CERN has not typically used InfiniBand con-
nectivity on a large scale, so the CERN IT
networking team did not support it. The
Intel Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapter
offered an easier-to-manage network that
delivered the level of latency the engineering
teams required. Meinhard comments: “We
have chosen this solution as it gives us good
performance based on standard protocols
at reasonable cost and an acceptable
power footprint.”
After approximately six months of running
the new cluster on the Intel Xeon processor
5500 series and 10GB Ethernet iWARP fabric,
CERN IT was able to identify a significant
ROI. The increased adaptability of the cluster,
enabled by the new Ethernet connection,
also made it more user-friendly, thereby
meeting one of CERN IT’s key objectives
for the migration.
“We can run more parallel applications while
giving users more support,” Meinhard points
out.
“With reduced maintenance complexity, we
don’t need to invest as many resources in
day-to-day upkeep of the cluster,” concludes
Meinhard. “Instead, we can focus on making
sure it’s optimized to deliver the absolute
best results for our research teams.”
CERN IT supports complex applications for
its engineering customers, and those appli-
cations demand high levels of performance
and efficiency to provide accurate and timely
results. RDMA (remote direct memory access)
is a key element in the fabric that delivers
the performance required, and has histori-
cally been available only on InfiniBand. Now
iWARP, available from Intel® Ethernet, can
provide this necessary RDMA capability over
Ethernet. As CERN IT has found, using a
high-performance Ethernet solution instead
of InfiniBand enables great simplification in
the fabric and higher ROI.
Performance: Data Intensive Computing:
Support the most demanding business data
processing, and computationally-intense
graphics.
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Spotlight on CERN IT
CERN is a highly demanding computing
environment. The CERN IT Department
maintains extensive networks on both
local and global scales. It pushes new
technologies to their limits and provides
a neutral ground for carrying out advanced
R&D with various partners. Its services
include large-scale computing and data
storage, Internet exchange, telecom facili-
ties, high speed networking, and data-
base services. These services make a
significant contribution towards helping
CERN meet its primary objective of finding
out what the universe is made of, and
learn about the laws of nature.
The need for RDMA
High-performance computing (HPC) appli-
cations require extreme parallelism of
the application across a cluster environ-
ment. With the advanced application
performance and bandwidth available
in the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series,
high-performance networking is needed
to efficiently connect the cluster.
HPC applications typically use Message
Passing Interface (MPI) to deliver perfor-
mance parallelism for the cluster appli-
cation. MPI enables RDMA (remote direct
memory access) to provide high-efficiency
networking that reduces the CPU burden
on applications.
RDMA solutions have long been available
on InfiniBand. Not as widely known, iWARP
provides the same RDMA mechanism over
an Ethernet interface running TCP/IP.
iWARP provides an Ethernet alternative
to InfiniBand, while still providing the
latency and performance required by these
HPC applications. Being able to implement
the performance RDMA protocol over a
standard Ethernet fabric thus enables a
new level of simplification in the fabric.
CERN IT switches to Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server
Adapters to help enhance world-leading research
capabilities
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