Designing high-end computing systems with InfiniBand and10-Gigabit Ethernet iWARP

InfiniBand (IB) architecture and 10-Gigabit Ethernet iWARP (10GE) are generating a lot of excitement towards building next generation High-End Computing (HEC) systems. This tutorial will provide an indepth look at this emerging trend and examine the suitability of these standards for prime-time HEC. It will start with a brief overview of IB and 10GE iWARP, and their architectural features. An overview of the emerging OpenFabrics stack which encapsulates both IB and 10GE iWARP in a unified manner will be presented. IB and 10GE iWARP hardware/software solutions and the market trends will be highlighted. Challenges in designing different kinds of systems using these standards on multi-core platforms for performance, scalability, portability and reliability will be covered. Specifically, case studies and experiences in designing HPC clusters (with MPI-1 and MPI-2 programming models), Parallel FileSystems, Networked File Systems (NFS), Storage Protocols, Multi-tier Datacenters, and Virtualization schemes will be presented together with the associated performance numbers and comparisons.