|
PANTAmatrix brings together InfiniBand, PCI-Express™, HyperTransport™, AMD Opteron™ processors and SATA or SAS based storage in a simple but very powerful architecture. The architecture maximizes overall system effectiveness by avoiding bottlenecks and allowing balanced configurations which best match application requirements.
PANTAmatrix Architecture
The PANTAmatrix blade form-factor compute modules host 2 or 4 dual-core AMD Opteron™ processors and connect to a highly scalable shared I/O subsystem through up to six low latency InfiniBand planes, to provide unprecedented I/O bandwidth for loading and processing data.
By matching the HyperTransport processor bus with up to three PCIexpress 8x controllers, each connecting 2 IB links to the processors, the PANTAmatrix design ensures that there are no bottlenecks in the data path between networks, storage, and processors. PANTA's smart scaling feature allows two compute modules to be combined into a 16-core, 128GB compute node with up to 18 GB/s of I/O capacity.
The SysManager software supports the management and dynamic provisioning of the hardware, and efficient creation and management of boot images. It resides on a pair of redundant control nodes.
Compute nodes access storage and network resources through the systems' shared, virtualized I/O sub-system. Storage can be directly InfiniBand attached or attached to external (FC or IP) networks.
Ethernet and FC access is achieved through bridging software in the PANTAmatrix control nodes or 3rd party bridge modules in InfiniBand switches.
The cost-effective PANTAmatrix intelligent storage modules use SATA disk drives and connect directly to the InfiniBand fabric to provide maximum, unobstructed bandwidth between the disk drives and the compute nodes. Storage modules can be scaled out to offer very large storage capacities, while the scalable InfiniBand fabric ensures that I/O bandwidth can scale in a commensurate fashion.
By using InfiniBand protocol implementations that are optimized for its target applications, PANTAmatrix further improves on the low-latency characteristics of InfiniBand and maximizes scalability while minimizing latency to far below that of Ethernet based clusters.
PANTAmatrix accomplishes this with an industry standard x86 architecture, making it an ideal platform for a family of information appliances that are based on widely used industry-standard software, while matching or exceeding the performance and scalability of proprietary appliances.
^ Return to Top
| 
