In order to meet the exacting requirements of this program, Quadrics developed a custom version of its QsNet switch and expanded the number of nodes in the fat tree topology for a given number of switch stages to produce a more cost effective network. This allowed the proven supercomputer class technology of QsNet to be combined with commodity processing elements. In the collaboration, Quadrics focuses on the core enabling technologies to achieve capability within a production environment allowing LLNL to exploit the widespread availability of third-party hardware, software and service bases.
"The type of Science and Engineering calculations required by Livermore's national security mission require a cluster of this size and a very high bandwidth and low-latency interconnect. The long-term collaboration between Quadrics and LLNL has been essential in providing demonstrable and scalable performance," said Dr. Mark Seager, LLNL's Asst. Dept. Head for TeraScale Systems. "The 11.2 teraFLOP/s Dual Xeon system will significantly expand the computing resources available to Livermore's unclassified researchers."