IDT RapidIO 20Gbps-per-port switches provide high-performance interconnect for low-power BrownDwarf supercomputer

International Supercomputing Conference 2013, USA: Integrated Device Technology Inc. (IDT) announced that the IDT CPS-1848 and CPS-1616 Gen 2 Serial RapidIO switches provide the key system interconnect for the low-power BrownDwarf Supercomputer developed by nCore HPC and Prodrive.

IDT's RapidIO switches offer 20 Gbps throughput per port with the lowest latency and the highest performance-per-watt compared to other interconnects, enabling nCore and Prodrive to use Texas Instruments’ (TI) RapidIO-equipped processors and leapfrog supercomputing incumbents.

The BrownDwarf supercomputer leverages TI's Keystone-II, which integrates multiple ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processors, and TMS320C66x digital signal processors (DSPs) that feature embedded RapidIO Gen2 endpoints developed by IDT.

BrownDwarf's three-shelf ATCA-based system delivers 70 teraflops of performance with 144 AMC-based nodes and 4032 processing cores. Taking into account the entire system power consumption, including processing, interconnect, and infrastructure, this equates to a very impressive 6.4 gigaflops per watt. In addition, the supercomputer is designed to easily scale using open standard RapidIO-based inter-cabinet switching, creating large multi-cabinet systems with up to 64K computing nodes.