Quadrics

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This is an article about the computing company, for use in mathematics, see quadric.

Quadrics is a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produce hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. In June 2004 the second and the third fastest supercomputers in the world used QsNet, Quadrics' interconnect technology.

The Quadrics name was first used in 1993 for a commercialized version of the APE-100 SIMD parallel computer produced by Alenia Spazio and originally developed by INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. In 1996, a new Alenia subsidiary, Quadrics Supercomputers World (QSW) was formed, based in Bristol, UK and Rome, Italy, inheriting the Quadrics SIMD product line and the Meiko CS-2 massively parallel supercomputer architecture. In 2002 the company name was abbreviated to Quadrics.

The new company soon focussed on the development potential of the CS-2's processor interconnect technology. Their first design was the Elan2 network ASIC, intended for use with the UltraSPARC CPU, attached to it using the UPA system bus. Plans to introduce the Elan2 were later dropped, and a new Elan3 hosted on PCI introduced instead. By the time of its release Elan3 had been re-aimed at the DEC Alpha/PCI market instead, after Quadrics had formed a relationship with DEC.

The combination of Quadrics and Alpha EV6 CPUs proved very successful, and Digital/Compaq rapidly became one of the world's largest suppliers of supercomputers. This culminated with the building the largest machine in the USA, the 20TFLOP ASCI Q, installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002/2003. This machine consists of 2048 4*1.25 GHz CPU EV67 Alphaserver SC ES45 nodes, and two rails of the Quadrics QsNet network.

Quadrics also had success in selling Linux based systems. Quadrics' first Linux based system was installed in June/July 2001 at SHARCNET (http://www.sharcnet.ca). It was the fastest civilian system in Canada at the time of installation. Another high profile Quadrics system was the fastest Linux cluster in the world called Thunder installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003/2004, Thunder consists of 1024 Intel Tiger Quad Itanium® II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 teraflops on parallel Linpack. Peak performance of the system is 22.9 teraflops. The level of efficiency is 87%.

In 2004 Quadrics was selected by Bull for what will be the fastest supercomputer in Europe: Tera10 [1] at the French CEA: 544 Bull NovaScale 6160 computing nodes, each including eight Itanium® 2 processors. The global configuration will feature 8,704 processors with 27 terabytes of core memory. Each of these computing nodes will contain multiple Quadrics QsNetII (Elan4) network adapters to deliver over 60 teraflops (sixty thousands billions of operations per second).

More recently, Quadrics has been selected by HP for the upgrade of SHARCNET, the Canadian Cluster of Clusters, with four new high-performance computing clusters that will increase the network's capacity from 1,000 to 6,000 processors. QsNetII will be used for one capacity and one capability cluster.

In August 2005 Quadrics and STMicroelectronics signed a development agreement. The cooperation will cover the design of a future generations of Quadrics high speed multi gigabit interconnect, and the exploitation of the products in a range of high volume applications.

In Nov 2005 Quadrics announced a new product based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, called QsTenG.

1 Quadrics products
- 1.1 Hardware
  - 1.1.1 QsTenG
- 1.2 Software
2 External links
3 References

[edit] Quadrics products

[edit] Hardware

QsNet I - Quadrics interconnect based around the elan3/elite3 ASICs (350MBs @ 5us MPI latency)
QsNet II - Quadrics interconnect based around the elan4/elite4 ASICs (912MB/s on SR1400 EM64T and 1.26us MPI latency on HP DL145G2)
QsNet II E-Series- a range of small-medium configurations (8-128-way) at less than USD 1,800 price/per port
QsTenG - 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch for up to 96 ports.

[edit] QsTenG

In Nov 2005 Quadrics announced a new product based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, called QsTenG. The first QsTenG switch is an 8U chassis with 12 slots for 10 GigE line cards. Each line card has eight 10 GigE ports that connect using 10GBASE-CX4 connectors (they look like the new "thin" Infiniband cables). The switch can have up to a total of 96 ports of 10 GigE. The remaining four ports on the line card are used internally to connect the line cards in a fat tree configuration. This means that the network is 2:1 oversubscribed but looks to have good performance. This will one of the largest 10 GigE single switch on the market. Quadrics will have follow-on products that increase the port count to 160 and then 1,600.

Image:217Quad 246 copy.JPG

QsTenG switch without the facia

[edit] Software

RMS - a cluster resource manager software package
Quadrics Linux Software - core components of the QsNet software release for Linux under the GNU Public License