QLogic Automates Installation, Verification, Monitoring and Management of InfiniBand Fabrics

By DE Editors

QLogic has extended its software capabilities with InfiniBand Fabric Suite (IFS) 7.0. The latest version of QLogic’s fabric management software package enables users to optimize fabric performance and communications efficiency, while minimizing management costs, for high performance computing (HPC) clusters of any size, according to the company.

A new feature of the release is the integration of vFabric QoS (Quality of Service) with workflow schedulers from Adaptive Computing and Platform Computing into IFS 7.0, making it possible for HPC users to set a priority and QoS level as the message passing interface (MPI) application is being scheduled. This can reduce management overhead, simplify cluster scheduling, and optimize use of the fabric.

“IDC end-user studies and research have consistently shown that InfiniBand-based systems are the fasting growing in HPC today. Integrating vFabrics with high performing job schedulers is another step forward for QLogic’s IFS,” says Steve Conway, research vice president at IDC. “This integration joins other key features such as adaptive and dispersive routing to make IFS 7.0 stronger in the InfiniBand fabric management space.”

IFS 7.0 incorporates the following new features:

• Integration with resourcemanagement and/or workload scheduling software.
• Enhanced Fabric Viewer thatenables users to identify and correct fabric errors, signal integrityissues and congested links/paths.
• Support for newer versionsof Performance Scaled Messaging (PSM) that is now included with OpenFabricEnterprise Distribution starting with version 1.5.3.
• Fabric Dashboard, anintuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that supports statistical data innear real time.
• Increased support forcomprehensive stress tests of links and cables to make it faster andeasier to bring up InfiniBand fabrics.
• A new algorithm thatsignificantly improves static routing balance for ‘all-to-all’communications for large fabrics.
• The Congestion ControlAlgorithm delivers a 25% throughput improvement over previous IFSreleases.
• Improvements for enhancedfile system performance with Lustre and GPFS as well as for high corecount processors, such as AMD Opteron Magny-Cours and Interlagos.

 “A continued focus for QLogic is to simplify and improve the management of InfiniBand environments,” says Joe Yaworski, director of HPC product and solution marketing at QLogic. “By automating workflow scheduling and supporting virtually every major ecosystem partner, IFS 7.0 delivers the tools that network managers need to get the most out of their InfiniBand fabric and compute cluster investments.”

For more information, visit QLogic.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.