Quadrics

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

Infobox Company
name = Quadrics Ltd.

type = Private Subsidiary
genre =
foundation = 1996
founder =
location_city = Bristol
location_country = UK
locations =
area_served =
key_people =
industry = HPC Interconnects
products = QsNet, RMS, 10GigE switches
services = Linux Clustering
revenue =
operating_income =
net_income =
owner =
num_employees =
parent = Alenia, part of Finmeccanica
divisions =
subsid =
slogan =
homepage = [http://www.quadrics.com www.quadrics.com]
footnotes =
intl = yes

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. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world were based on Quadrics' interconnect. [cite web|url= http://www.top500.org/list/2003/06/100|accessdate= 2008-07-23|title="top500 list"|publisher=top500]

Company History

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 Roe, Italy, inheriting the Quadrics SIMD product line and the Meiko CS-2 massively parallel supercomputer architecture. In 2002 the company name was shortened to be simply Quadrics.

Initially, the new company 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 consisted of 1024 Intel Tiger Quad Itanium II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 teraflops on parallel Linpack. Peak performance of the system was 22.9 teraflops, at a level of efficiency of 87%.

In 2004 Quadrics was selected by Bull for what will be the fastest supercomputer in Europe: Tera10 [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERA-10] 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).

Quadrics was selected by HP for the upgrade of SHARCNET, the Canadian Cluster of Clusters, with four new high-performance computing clusters that would increase the network's capacity from 1,000 to 6,000 processors. QsNetII was 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.

Quadrics products

Hardware

* Quadrics QsNet^I - HPC interconnect based around the "elan3/elite3" ASICs (350MBs @ 5us MPI latency)
* Quadrics QsNet^II - HPC interconnect based around the "elan4/elite4" ASICs (912MB/s on SR1400 EM64T and 1.26us MPI latency on HP DL145G2)
* QsTenG - 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, from 24-pot (1U) to very large switches.
* Quadrics QsNet^III - HPC interconnect based around the "elan5/elite5" ASICs. This is the first product from Quadrics that is compatable with a standard - in this case 10 GBit ethernet.

QsTenG

In Nov 2005 Quadrics announced a new product based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, called QsTenG. The first QsTenG switch was an 8U chassis with 12 slots for 10 GigE line cards, making 96 ports in total. Each line card had eight 10 GigE ports that connect using 10GBASE-CX4 connectors. Each line card also had four internal ports that connected the line cards together into a fat tree configuration. Since then, Quadrics have brought out a second generation of 10 GigE switches, starting with a compact 1U switch with 24 ports.They are expecetd to bring out a range of larger switches in late 2008.

oftware

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

ee also

*NUMAlink
*HIPPI
*Infiniband
*Myrinet
*Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI)
*Gigabit Ethernet

External links

* [http://www.quadrics.com Quadrics website]
* [http://www.llnl.gov/linux/thunder/ LLNL Thunder page]
* [http://www.top500.org Top500 website]
* [http://www.fujitsu.com/us/news/pr/fma_20051110.html Fujitsu]

References

* [http://web1.quadrics.com/twiki/bin/view/FAQs/QuadricsCompanyName Quadrics company name FAQ]