QLogic TrueScale InfiniBand adapters deliver superior scalable performance, allowing organizations to effectively move applications to larger clusters to achieve the shortest time-to-solution. TrueScale adapters provide the highest message rate and lowest latency for multi-core nodes and large clusters. They also offer the highest overall bandwidth on PCI Express Gen1 platforms. Choosing QLogic ensures reliable interoperability, easier installation through standards compliance, and enhanced reliability as the only supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand solutions backed by a three-year warranty.

1. WHITE PaPEr
8 Reasons to Choose QLogic
TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters
TrueScale Architecture Enables Reliable End-to-End Support for OpenFabrics
Software Distribution
Superior Scalable Performance
Executive Summary Key Findings
Choosing QLogic TrueScale InfiniBand provides superior return
QLogic TrueScale InfiniBand (IB) Host Channel adapters (HCas)
On Investment (rOI) due to:
deliver industry-leading scalable performance, allowing
organizations to effectively move their applications onto larger Superior Performance of High Performance Computing (HPC)
clusters to achieve the shortest time-to-solution and to maximize Applications
their return On Investment (rOI). 1. TrueScale adapters deliver the highest message rate for multi-
core compute nodes and large node count clusters
QLogic’s TrueScale adapters demonstrate ultra-low latency, the
2. TrueScale architecture delivers the lowest scalable latency
highest message rate, and a high effective bandwidth compared
to any competitive offering in the market today. additionally, 3. Highest overall bandwidth on PCI Express Gen1 platforms
these superior performance attributes are maintained as the core
4. Superior power efficiency
and node counts are scaled. as a result, organizations relying on
Guaranteed Interoperability
clustered systems for critical computing tasks will experience a
significant increase in productivity as they expand their compute 5. Easiest installation due to compliance to industry standards.
Customers can leverage QLogic’s NETtrack™ program, which
clusters.
insures that QLogic adapters are certified across all major IB
applications.
QLogic, as a world-class supplier of Enterprise connectivity
solutions in Fibre Channel and Ethernet technologies, is now • PCI-SIG and InfiniBand Trade association (IBTa)
offering their InfiniBand customers differentiated benefits, such compliance
as lower cost of ownership, industry leading adapter warranty, 6. Support for OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) with
reliability, and 24×7 customer support. optional enhancements to improve MPI applications, SrP, and
VNIC performance
This paper provides an overview of the advantages of QLogic
Enhanced Reliability
TrueScale adapters, with a focus on factors that matter to CIOs,
end users, and systems administrators: scalable performance, 7. Only supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand networking products
reliability, low power, superior application performance, and
8. Highest product reliability, backed by a 3-year warranty
ROI.
• Stateless design is inherently more resilient to fabric
failures

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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
When messaging requirements dominate in an application, QLogic’s
Introduction
advantage over alternative interconnect solutions is significant at
Interconnect performance has become a key factor in overall
small scales and dramatic at large scale. The fundamental reason is
application and clustered system performance. This will continue
that QLogic’s architecture and interfaces are optimized to spend the
to be the case as applications become more complex, more
least amount of time on parallel communications, so that applications
sophisticated, and are scaled onto increasingly larger clusters to
can make better use of their computation resources and generate
accelerate the time-to-solution for critical business and scientific
answers quicker.
problems.
QLogic’s IB adapters deliver superior rOI by lowering both capital
and operating expense. QLogic adapter’s superior ability to scale
Superior Performance
real-world applications means that organizations can achieve
Reason #1: Highest Message Rate Performance better utilization of their clustered computing assets, and therefore
Designed to leverage the capabilities of multi-core servers, the maximize their rOI. In addition, QLogic’s solutions allow bridging
TrueScale architecture can handle the increase in communication to both Ethernet and FC data center fabrics, giving customers the
requirements in a multi-core environment. With the prevalence flexibility to implement a converged fabric for their data center needs
of multi-core compute nodes in today’s HPC clusters, the while leveraging investments in their existing infrastructure.
communications burden per adapter is far greater than when single
and dual-core servers were the norm. Reason #3: Highest Overall Bandwidth on PCI Express Gen1
Platforms
To maintain a balanced system and make effective use of the QLogic is the only supplier of PCI Express Gen1 x16 IB adapters on the
available cores, the interconnect must be able to efficiently process market. For customers deploying PCI Express Gen1 platforms, only
a large number of messages at varied patterns. Unmatched in QLogic TrueScale adapters can take full advantage of the bandwidth
message rate performance, the TrueScale architecture is the ideal capability of the Double Date rate (DDr) InfiniBand aSIC and achieve
choice for multi-core compute nodes. true DDr performance.
Reason #2: Lowest Scalable Latency The following table lists the message rate, scalable latency, and
HPC application codes have become more parallelized to take peak bandwidth performance of the two TrueScale DDr adapters,
advantage of advances in cluster computing. as a result, these which offers the fastest time to solution and the highest rOI for HPC
codes are being deployed on larger systems now that they can take applications.
advantage of the additional compute resources available. Due to
the connectionless design and light-weight memory footprint per
process, only the TrueScale adapter was designed from the ground
up to scale efficiently with the size of the fabric.
TrueScale adapter OSU Message rate @ 8 ppn HPCC random ring Latency @ Throughput Performance
128 Cores
QLogic QLE7240 PCIe Gen1 x8 19 Million messages/sec 1.3 µs 1500 MBps
QLogic QLE7280 PCIe Gen1 x16 26 Million messages/sec 1.1 µs 1950 MBps
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
The QLE7200 series adapter’s low latency and high message rates QLogic InfiniBand Watts
result in superior real-world application scalability across nearly all HCa (maximum)
modeling and simulation applications. Well known applications that
QLE7140 2
have demonstrated superior scaling and outstanding performance
QLE7240 5.5
when running on clusters with the TrueScale interconnect include:
NaMD, amber8, STar-CD®, Fluent®, NWChem, DL_POLY, LS-DYNa®, QLE7280 6.5
aBaQUS®, PowerFlow, OpenFOaM, Eclipse™, WrF, POP, MM5,
LaMMPS, GaMMES, CPMD, aM2, CHarMM, GrOMaCS, and many
Typical wattage requirements could be considerably less depending
others.
on the communications activity at the time of measurement, but no
other IB vendor can provide maximum performance within these
power envelopes.
Guaranteed Interoperability
Enterprises deploying clustered computing infrastructures based on
IB require maximum levels of flexibility when it comes to selecting
and deploying network interconnect technology. Besides providing
the best performing IB adapters on the market, QLogic also delivers
unprecedented levels of flexibility when it comes to choices of
available software, hardware, interoperability, and interfaces to other
data center network fabrics.
Reason #5: Easiest Installation Due to Compliance to Industry
Beyond Hero Numbers White Paper Standards
an active board member of the OpenFabrics alliance, QLogic is fully
committed to industry standard form factors and IBTa specification
compliance. The only vendor to offer PCI Express x8 and x16 form
factor adapters that satisfy the IBTa 1.2 specification, QLogic plays
a leading role in fostering the adoption of InfiniBand technology as
an open standard and the continued development of the IB eco-
system.
DDr IB HCas QLogic Mellanox®
TrueScale ConnectX™
IBTa 1.2 compliance 4 No
QLogic’s TrueScale IB adapters provide:
Real Application Performance White Paper
• Support for popular file systems including GPFS, Lustre™, and
Please refer to the following UrL for White Papers on performance in
NFS®
real-world applications:
• Support for block storage devices including both direct-attached
http://www.qlogic.com/Educationandresources/
IB storage and gateway-attached Fibre Channel storage
WhitePapersresourcelibraryHpc.aspx
• Support for 10Gb Ethernet gateway for Ethernet network
connectivity
Reason #4: Superior Power Efficiency
QLogic’s TrueScale HCas are designed to provide outstanding • Support for the OpenFabrics alliance OFED release as well as all
performance with very low power requirements compared to standard OFED transport protocols
competitive offerings. The following chart depicts the maximum
• Support for the most common MPI implementations including
wattage draw for QLogic InfiniBand adapters.
Platform (Scali), HP, Intel®, QLogic, OpenMPI, MVaPICH, and
MPICH2
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
• QLogic enhanced versions of the SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP)
• Interoperability with all fabric switches including QLogic, Voltaire®,
and VNIC are also available, along with a variety of host-based
Cisco®, Mellanox, and Flextronics
utilities.
• Interoperability with fabric subnet managers from OFED, QLogic,
and all proprietary switch vendors all of these stacks can be used with the QLogic TrueScale adapter
to address requirements for high performance MPI applications in
• Interoperability with a wide variety of IB passive copper, active
addition to sockets and storage networking.
copper, and optical fiber cabling solutions
Cluster administrators can enjoy peace of mind when deploying The following graphic depicts the various components of the
QLogic TrueScale adapters, knowing that the adapters will work software stack provided by QLogic. The items in red are sourced
with their existing infrastructure as well as with any IBTa compliant from the OFED release. The optional value-added components from
equipment that will be added in the future. QLogic are in aqua. The community and third-party components are
in blue.
QLogic’s NETtrack Partner Program ensures that QLogic adapters
are certified with the most extensive list of IB application vendors in
the marketplace.
Options QLogic Mellanox
Certificate http://www.qlogic.com/ No
Partner Program interoperability/NETtrack.aspx
Orderable No
Hard Copy
Certification
Enhanced reliability
Guides
Reason #7: QLogic is the Only One-Stop Shop for End-to-End IB
Networking Products
HPC Interoperability Guide
QLogic is an end-to-end supplier of IB infrastructure products, from
host adapters and OpenFabrics-based software stacks to a wide
Reason #6: QLogic Provides Enhancements to Key Features in
variety of Edge and Director Class switch products that enable
OpenFabrics Software
the right-sizing of the cluster. QLogic also provides multi-protocol
QLogic offers a single Linux® driver that works with all QLogic
gateway products to extend into Ethernet LaN and Fibre Channel
adapters based on the TrueScale architecture. In addition, QLogic’s
SaN environments, a variety of active and passive cabling options,
driver is distributed as part of OFED and is included in the Linux
and a comprehensive portfolio of cluster management tools to tie it
distributions via kernel.org. OFED is an open source community stack
all together.
that includes protocols for sockets and storage communications;
and delivers industry standard IPoIB, SDP, SrP, and other upper level
QLogic’s complete IB solution includes:
protocols to applications.
• adapters
In addition to OFED, QLogic products provide the following additional
• Host software
optional capabilities:
• Switching fabric
• QLogic accelerated MPI stack: QLogic developed, this stack
• Ethernet and FC gateways
provides high performance MPI support for QLogic MPI, Open
MPI, HP-MPI, Scali MPI, MVaPICH, and MPICH2. (Check with your • Fabric management
QLogic sales representative for the latest list of supported MPI
• Copper and optical cabling solutions
libraries.)
QLogic is a proven supplier of Enterprise Class connectivity solutions
• Support for QLogic’s InfiniBand Fabric Suite (IFS): This set
and brings the benefits of an experienced, reliable partner to
of tools, which includes FastFabric™, QLogic’s Subnet Manager,
customers deploying IB networking technology. Working with a
and Fabric Viewer, simplifies installation and provides extensive
single vendor for all cluster and storage networking infrastructure
troubleshooting capabilities from a centralized location. IFS is
needs results in solution reliability and customer satisfaction.
available for purchase separately.
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
Reason #8: Highest Product Reliability Backed by 3-Year Summary and Conclusion
Warranty
Choosing the right InfiniBand adapter is critical for deploying clusters
Mellanox offers only 1 year of warranty on their IB adapters, with an
that require the highest possible performance at the lowest operating
extension to 3 years at a significant cost increase. Due to a highly
costs.
integrated aSIC, QLogic TrueScale IB adapters have a simplified
design requiring less on-board components. The combination of an
QLogic TrueScale IB adapters provide superior scalable performance
integrated aSIC and a firmware-less architecture provides minimum
capabilities, allowing customers to scale their applications onto
hardware related failures and a highly reliable adapter. QLogic backs
larger clusters with “fatter” nodes and achieve the shortest time-to-
its reliability claims with an unprecedented 3-year standard warranty
solution possible for a variety of applications. reducing the time-to-
at no extra charge. In addition, the higher reliability of TrueScale
solution by increasing the efficiency and utilization of their compute
adapters will translate directly into lower operating expenses over
environment allows customers to maximize their rOI.
the lifetime of the product.
as a world-class supplier of Enterprise connectivity solutions, QLogic
offers substantial advantages as a partner, allowing customers to
enjoy many benefits, including a lower total cost of ownership and
increased support and reliability.
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
appendix: Quick reference Sheet
QLogic TrueScale adapters: 8 reasons to Choose QLogic IB adapters
Category reason Benefit
Performance #1: Highest Message rate • Superior communication capabilities per adapter are well suited for
multi-core environments. High message rate per adapter can handle
Performance
communication requirements of additional cores.
#2: Lowest Scalable Latency • Superior application scaling driven by highest real messaging rate, lowest
real communications latency, and highest effective bandwidth over a
variety of message patterns. Superior communications/computation
overlap.
• Connectionless design and resulting light-weight memory footprint per
process enables better scaling.
#3: Highest Overall Bandwidth • Mellanox offers only Gen1 x8 and Gen2 x8 adapters. For customers with
Gen1 platforms, the only way to achieve full DDr performance is to use a
on PCI Express Gen1 Platforms
Gen1 x16 adapter, of which QLogic is the only supplier.
#4: Superior Power Efficiency QLogic InfiniBand Watts
HCa (maximum)
QLE7140 2
QLE7240 5.5
QLE7280 6.5
• Competitor quotes “typical” wattage rather than “maximum.” Typical
wattage requirements for QLogic could be considerably less depending
on the communications activity at the time of measurement, but no
other IB vendor can provide maximum performance within these power
envelopes.
Guaranteed #5: Easiest Installation Due • Founding member of the OpenFabrics alliance
Interoperability to Compliance to Industry • IBTa 1.2 compliance
Standards • Support for GPFS, Lustre, and NFS
• Support for block storage: IB and Fibre Channel
• Support for 10Gb Ethernet gateway
• Support for OFED release as well as all standard OFED transport
protocols
• Support for the most common MPI implementations: Platform (Scali), HP,
Intel, QLogic, OpenMPI, MVaPICH, and MPICH2
• all fabric switches including QLogic, Voltaire, Cisco, Mellanox, and
Flextronics
• Subnet Managers (SMs) from OFED, QLogic, and all proprietary switch
vendors
• all IB active and passive copper cabling as well as optical cabling
#6: QLogic Provides • In addition to OFED, QLogic provides the following additional optional
capabilities: QLogic accelerated MPI stack for QLogic MPI, Open MPI, HP-
Enhancements to Key Features
MPI, and Scali MPI; support for IFS; enhanced versions of SrP and VNIC
in OpenFabrics Software
host based utilities
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
QLogic TrueScale adapters: 8 reasons to Choose QLogic IB adapters
Category reason Benefit
Enhanced Reliability #7: QLogic is the Only One- • adapters
Stop Shop for End-to-End IB • Host software
Networking Products • Switching fabric
• Ethernet and FC gateways
• Fabric management
• Copper and optical cabling solutions
• Single vendor for increased levels of customer satisfaction and solution
reliability
• Highest reliability of supply chain solutions
#8: Highest Product reliability • Mellanox offers only 1 year of warranty.
Backed by 3-Year Warranty • TrueScale IB adapters have a simplified design requiring less on-board
components.
• The combination of an integrated aSIC and a firmware-less architecture
provides minimum hardware related failures.
• Higher reliability translates into lower operating expenses over the life of
the product.
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8 Reasons to Choose QLogic TrueScale™ InfiniBand™ Adapters TrueScale Architecture Enables Superior Scalable Performance
Disclaimer
reasonable efforts have been made to ensure the validity and accuracy of these performance tests. QLogic Corporation is not liable for any
error in this published white paper or the results thereof. Variation in results may be a result of change in configuration or in the environment.
QLogic specifically disclaims any warranty, expressed or implied, relating to the test results and their accuracy, analysis, completeness or
quality.
www.qlogic.com
Corporate Headquarters QLogic Corporation 26650 aliso Viejo Parkway aliso Viejo, Ca 92656 949.389.6000
Europe Headquarters QLogic (UK) LTD. Quatro House Lyon Way, Frimley Camberley Surrey, GU16 7Er UK +44 (0) 1276 804 670
© 2008 QLogic Corporation. Specifications are subject to change without notice. all rights reserved worldwide. QLogic, the QLogic logo, and FastFabric are trademarks or registered trademarks of QLogic Corporation. Mellanox and ConnectX are trademarks or
registered trademark of Mellanox Technologies, Inc. Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. Voltaire is a registered trademark of Voltaire, Inc. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
STar-CD is a registered trademark of CD-adapco. FLUENT is a registered trademark of Fluent Inc. LS-DYNa is a registered trademark of Livermore Software Technology Corporation aBaQUS is a registered trademark or trademark of aBaQUS, Inc Eclipse is a
trademark of eclipse.org Lustre is a trademark of Cluster File Systems, Inc. in the USa. NFS is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. aMD is a registered trademark of advanced Micro Devices, Inc. InfiniBand is a registered trademark and service
mark of the InfiniBand Trade association. all other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Information supplied by QLogic Corporation is believed to be accurate and reliable. QLogic Corporation assumes no
responsibility for any errors in this brochure. QLogic Corporation reserves the right, without notice, to make changes in product design or specifications.
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