Sun has introduced the world's largest InfiniBand core switch, the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456. The total data throughput for the switch is 110,100 Gbps with a port-to-port latency of 700 nanosecond.

This switch supports up to 24 line cards, each with 48 12X iPass connectors. A single cable can connect one 12x iPass port to three 4x Single Data Rate or Double Data Rate (SDR/DDR) Infiniband connectors through a 12x-to-4x splitter cable.

Its 24 cards per switch times 48 iPass connectors per card times 3 IB ports per iPass equals 3,456 connections.

The Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 can be used to connect lots of Sun Blade servers together with the new Sun Blade 6000/6048 infiniband switched network express module. Twelve blade servers in a 6048 are each provided with two 4x IB through the Switched NEM (24 IB ports in total). Only eight 12x IB connections/cables to the 3456 switch are needed to provide 24 4x IB ports to 12 blades.

A newly published white paper, Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 System Architecture: Massively Scalable Infiniband Switch Architecture for Petascale Computing states "...with capacity for connection of up to 3,456 nodes, the Sun DS 3456 system allows deployment of more teraflops per dollar and lower complexity and power consumption than is possible from alternative solutions. The Sun DS 3456 system is a non-blocking monolithic core switch, designed to replace as many as 300 standard switches and thousands of cables."

Noted specifications:

• 55 Tbps bisection bandwidth
• Port-to-port latency of 700 nanoseconds
• Congestion control with Forward and Backward Explicit Congestion Notification (FECN and BECN)
• 8 data virtual lanes
• 1 management virtual lane
• 4096 byte MTU
• Ability to scale to 13,824 end nodes when deployed with the Sun Blade 6048 Switched InfiniBand Network Express Module (NEM)

The paper offers more insight into the switch's component architecture, integrated switch control and management, and deployment. [...read more...]

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