Mellanox Evening Event at SC11

Posted on October 19, 2011 by

One of my favorite ‘SC activities has always been the annual Mellanox event. After many years of attending, Mellanox is repaying the favor this year and asked me to be one of the keynote speakers, along with their CEO, Eyal Waldman, and TACC’s Jay Boisseau. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Eyal and Jay over the years and they are always interesting speakers.

While I don’t want to give-away too much about my talk, it will definitely be aligned with the evening’s theme of how Mellanox’s connectivity solutions are delivering the key ingredients for sustainable HPC environments. HP will be talking a lot about FDR Infiniband during the SC11 show so you should look forward to hearing from me on how HP and Mellanox are doing delivering FDR solutions to help customers drive down the cost/byte and power/byte of HPC networking.

For many years, the cost and power drivers in HPC where on the compute side, and while $/watt/FLOP are still dominant, technologies like Nvidia’s Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs and Intel’s upcoming Many Integrated Core technology delivery drastically improved performance/watt over traditional x86 processors. As this trend continues, as we reach Exascale performance targets by the end of the decade, FLOPS essentially become free and the power and cost to move data outside of the CPU starts to dominate.

Already today, FDR and many QDR networks use optical cables to reduce the power required to move data between racks of servers. Somewhere around the middle of the decade, it is expected that interconnects within a server will turn to photonics to drive down the power and cost of moving data within a single server. By the end of the decade, exascale systems are likely to have photonic interconnects built directly onto the processor chips.

To hear more about my thoughts on Infiniband and HPC, be sure to register today for the Mellanox event at SC11. Hope to see you there.

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About Marc Hamilton

Marc Hamilton – Hyperscale Business Unit, HP Enterprise Group. Marc works in the Hyperscale Business Unit within HP's Enterprise Group where he leads the HPC team for the Americas region. He brings more than 26 years of global engineering, sales and executive management experience to HP. Marc’s team works across HP engineering, marketing, and sales organizations as well as HP Labs to design, develop, and deliver world class HPC systems, ranging from some of the world’s fastest supercomputers installed at national research labs and leading universities to commercial HPC systems across a variety of industries including energy, manufacturing, financial services, and life sciences. Prior to joining HP in October 2010, Marc spent 16 years at Sun Microsystems and Oracle in HPC and other sales and marketing executive management roles. At Sun, his team built a number of systems that placed in the top 10 of the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including systems at Sandia National Labs, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Germany’s Juelich supercomputing center, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Prior to Sun, Marc worked at TRW developing HPC applications for the US aerospace and defense industry. He has published a number of technical articles and is the author of the book, “Software Development, Building Reliable Systems”. Marc holds a BS degree in Math and Computer Science from UCLA, an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from USC, and is a graduate of the UCLA Executive Management program.
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One Response to Mellanox Evening Event at SC11

  1. John Mitchell says:
    December 7, 2011 at 1:58 pm

    Hi Mark,

    I’m intrigued by your post – “Exascale performance targets by the end of the decade, FLOPS essentially become free and the power and cost to move data outside of the CPU starts to dominate.”

    Is you presentation from the Mellanox event available?

    Regards,

    John Mitchell
    Active Cable Solutions Marketing Manager
    Intersil Corp.

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