When we take a look at the I/O from the outside world the PCIe is the most widely used computer expansion card standard - besides HTX - and its second generation is capable of delivering 32 Gb/s. However, there is some protocol overhead involved and the real throughput a device - such as a network interface card - can attain, is 25Gb/s, explained Dr. Fischer.

Myricom took the NIC bonding known from TCP/IP to another level and provides this feature to the HPC market in which a single endpoint used by the middleware like MPI is striped over multiple ports. In the booth at the ISC'09 Exhibitiion, the Myricom team demonstrated 4 active ports aggregated to deliver a sustained performance of 40Gb/s data rate, actually 39.3Gb/s for the Intel MPI benchmarks.

There are other networks offering high bandwidth as well. For example the most popular specialty network in the Top500 is Infiniband. The recent upgrade to QDR advertises 40Gb connectivity but it is the signaling rate which is 32Gb data rate. With the limitations of current PCIe a customer this way only achieves 25Gb out of 40Gb. Thus the highest sustained bandwidth on the show floor was the bonded Myri-10G NICs.

This however will improve for IB when the next PCIe generation - Generation 3 - is available to the market. However, this still will take a couple of years to become mainstream, warned Dr. Fischer.

When using NIC bonding or teaming, not only is the data rate of 40Gb/s appealing to bandwidth hungry applications but it can also be used for fault tolerance.

Myri-10G which is the fourth generation of Myricom products is now embracing the HPC as well as the Ethernet world, allowing even HPC applications to run with the lowest latency on standard 10GbE. Myri-10G NICs support both Ethernet and Myrinet network protocols at the Data Link level. It was first demonstrated at ISC'07 in Dresden and the competition is picking up on this idea.

During the Hot Seat Session Dr. Fischer presented the Lanai Z8ES chip to the audience and the jury. It is a fast, programmable, low-power controller between PCI Express x8 and two 10Gb ports and it was successful on first silicon.

The Myri-10G NIC includes two ports for failover, a single PCIe device and achieves 10Gb/s throughput. It can also work with four ports: two for performance and two for failover with two PCIe devices for a 20Gb/s throughput.

In the Myricom portfolio there is equally the Gen2 PCIe NIC with 2 SFP+ ports for performance.

The preferred solution is the one-port NIC for HPC clusters, noted Dr. Fischer. Indiana University and TU Dresden won the first place in the SC08 Cluster Challenge with it.

The MX-10G is a low-level, message-passing system for low-latency, low-host-CPU-utilization with kernel-bypass operation of Myri-10G NICs for HPC clusters over either 10Gb Ethernet or 10Gb Myrinet. It includes TCP/IP, UDP/IP, and MPI and sockets middleware and supports NIC bonding.

Myricom has introduced a Video Pump for UDP streaming of IPTV video. The typical demonstration maintains 9.6 GB/s and 2400 streams, stated Dr. Fischer.

Myricom is working on new chips as well. The company is following the mainstream and eagerly waiting for the next generation of Ethernet to be ratified which will bring 40Gb/s data rate to a single port, predicted Dr. Fischer.