Melbourne's Monash University has chosen Cloud networking solutions company, Mellanox Technologies, to provide the network for the world’s first 100Gb/s end-to-end OpenStack Cloud.
Following the success of the university’s first venture into OpenStack initiated with Mellanox,it has expanded its Research @ Cloud Monash (R@CMon) platform to support additional High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Throughput Computing (HTC) workloads to handle growth of data, users and applications.
Mellanox’s 100Gb/s CloudX Ethernet fabric with native SR-IOV, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and advanced network automation and monitoring capabilitie is targeted at helping Monash address R@CMon’s heightened requirements for Cloud network performance and scalability.
“We are extremely pleased with our current Coud fabric based on Mellanox CloudX. Therefore we are continuing our partnership with Mellanox to incorporate their 100Gb/s end-to-end interconnect into R@CMon,” Monash eResearch Centre senior Cloud architect, Blair Bethwaite, said.
“On top of R@CMon, we’ve established numerous Virtual Laboratories for data-intensive characterization and analysis. They are virtual desktops and Docker-based tools that are already linked up to the data sources and the computing resources,” she added.
“They are becoming the standard operating environment for the modern day researcher to support general purpose HPC and HTC [including GPGPU capabilities and Hadoop], interactive visualisation and analysis. Only Mellanox can support the intensity and variety of our workload and provide guaranteed performance and user experience to our research community.”
Mellanox Technologies vice president of marketing, Kevin Deierling, described Mellanox CloudX as a recipe for building an efficient Cloud infrastructure for modern workloads such as Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
“As a key element of our CloudX architecture, our Spectrum Open Ethernet switch delivers non-blocking 6.4Tb/s full wire speed switching and routing capacity with industry-leading latency and power efficiency,” he said.
“Spectrum is the world's first non-blocking 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch and using Spectrum for 100Gb/s backbone together with leaf and spine switching, empowers Monash to have high-performance storage connected at Spectrum’s full 100Gb/s, with 50Gb/s connected hosts for HPC and 25Gb/s connected hosts for general-purpose cloud to more effectively support the University’s growth and research prowess.”
