InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link primarily used in high-performance computing. Its features include quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable. The InfiniBand architecture specification defines a connection between processor nodes and high performance I/O nodes such as storage devices. InfiniBand forms a superset of the Virtual Interface Architecture.
IBM is researching an exaflop machine with the processing power of about one billion PCs. The machine will be used to help process the Exabyte of data per day expected to flow off the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. The company is also researching solid state storage technology called 'racetrack memory' which is much faster and denser than flash and may hold the secret to storing the data from the SKA. The story also says that the SKA is unlikely to use grid computing or a cloud-based approach to processing the telescope data due to challenge in transferring so much data (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day).
Manufacturer of computer hardware and software including SPARC processors, SPARC and Opteron powered servers and workstations, Java and the Solaris Operating Environment.
M. Kranz, W. Spiessl, und A. Schmidt. Proc. Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications PerCom '07, Seite 79--86. (2007)
M. Kranz, W. Spiessl, und A. Schmidt. Proc. Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing
and Communications PerCom '07, Seite 79--86. (2007)