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QS8A QsNetII 8-way kit
| Quadrics has released a number of standalone switch chassis which provide very cost-effective switch solutions in the range of 8-128 way cluster configurations. The first such product is QS8A, an 8-way standalone switch, available since March 2004. This provides an entry-level product for Quadrics partners and end-users to evaluate QsNetII as a solution for 32-bit and 64-bit commodity computing, for in-house support or small benchmark requirements. | |  QS8A 8-way switch |
Technical Specification
The QS8A switch is a stand alone 8 way QsNetII switch, which can connect up to 8 servers with PCI-X IO slots, using Quadrics QM500 PCI-X Host Adaptors. The internal switch architecture is a full crosspoint switch. In common with all QsNetII switches, the QS8A has a built in control and diagnostics processor which is accessed over a dedicated Ethernet port. Systems built from QS8A switches use exactly the same system and user level software as other member of the QsNetII product family so that the software environment remains the same scaling from an 8 way development system to a large production system. QsNetII is supported under Linux for the Intel XEON and Itanium processor families and the AMD Opteron architecture. A full list of validated hardware platforms is available from www.quadrics.com/support.
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MPI
Quadrics MPI provides an optimized implementation of MPI 1.2 that makes full use of the capabilities of the hardware. The Quadrics MPI implementation is based on MPICH from Argonne National Laboratory, with extensions that make use of the broadcast and global operations of the QsNet network, and the programmable IO processor on the network interface. A subset of MPI-2 operations providing one-sided communications is also supported. Performance of MPI is shown for multi-rail configurations comparing the different versions of QsNet.
Quadrics MPI provides for automatic striping of large transfers across multiple rails with almost perfect scaling. Elan kernel comms provide for use of multiple rails for TCP/IP and other system services.
Simple MPI benchmarks demonstrate inter-node latency of 1.6 to 3 us and bandwidth of 800-920 Mbytes/s per QsNetII rail .
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Software Environment
Quadrics software is available in two parts, the base open source release and the RMS release.
The Quadrics software provides all the necessary functionality to support parallel applications on QsNet, program QsNet hardware and run Quadrics diagnostics on QsNet systems. It enables parallel program to be run with public domain job startup software. The RMS release builds on this base to provide a flexible production environment.
The Quadrics open source software release, is available under the Gnu Public License from the Quadrics web site www.quadrics.com/linux. Supported Linux distributions include Red Hat Advanced Server (for Intel Xeon and Itanium), SuSE Linux (for AMD Opteron), Livermore Chaos and HP HPTC Linux. The generic Linux kernel can also be used.
The Quadrics RMS release is also available from our website. 30-day trial licenses for this software are available from support@quadrics.com. Systems that do not have RMS can use for example the pdsh utility to launch parallel jobs: For users who want to fully open source solution, not using RMS, public domain tools are available that implement elements of RMS functionality, such as pdsh from LLNL www.llnl.gov/linux/pdsh. Third party software for Quadrics systems includes LSF from Platform Computing, PBS, the TotalView parallel debugger from Etnus and the Vampir profiling system. Quadrics software supports Intel and GNU compilers for C, C++, and Fortran.
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Software included in the 8-way QsNetII Kit
QsNet Evaluation Systems include the Quadrics Resource Management System (RMS), the open source software release and one year's support for both. Support includes assistance with installation, access to Quadrics online fault reporting system, software upgrades and patches.
Quadrics Evaluation systems are ideally suited for software research and development activities. Each application has its own direct and protected access to the network interface, without going through a traditional protocol stack; it is therefore possible to develop and deploy new communications libraries in one part of the machine without compromising the integrity of other applications running on the machine.
Detailed documentation on this and a wide range of other subjects is available from www.quadrics.com/documentation. |
Pricing
To see the price list click on the following link. |
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