Voltaire FCA Software Reduces Runtime of HPC Applications

By DE Editors

Voltaire Ltd., a provider of scale-out data center fabrics, has announced the availability of Voltaire’s Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) solution for environments using Platform MPI.  Voltaire FCA is a software and hardware solution designed to speed up message passing interface (MPI) performance over x86 based clusters to accelerate performance of high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

In a new benchmark test conducted by HP, Voltaire FCA software improved performance of ANSYS FLUENT between 14 and 30% and CD-adapco Star-CD AClass by 10%, according to Voltaire. The 192-core benchmark environment consisted of 96 HP BL460 blade servers,  Voltaire Grid Director 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and Platform MPI.  Platform MPI is a high-performance implementation of the MPI.

Voltaire FCA software accelerates MPI collective operations by using Voltaire switches and their on-board processors to offload parts of group communication onto the switching fabric while Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager software (UFM) orchestrates a topology-based collective flow.

“Gaining a 10 to 30% improvement in application performance is very significant and can mean substantial gains in competitive advantage for a business,” says Asaf Somekh, vice president of Marketing, Voltaire.  “The integration of Voltaire FCA software and Platform MPI enables a broader range of HPC customers to leverage these new performance advancements.”

For more information, visit Voltaire.

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