IBM has announced that its SoftLayer cloud computing infrastructure now supports InfiniBand networking. Because InfiniBand can transfer data much more quickly than other types of networking connections, it’s the preferred network architecture for high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
“Bringing InfiniBand capability to the cloud is driven by the growing need for extremely high levels of speed and performance for scenarios such as HPC and big data,” Philbert Shih, managing director for Structure Research, said. “This type of offering will help enable engineers and scientists to build, compute and analyze simulations in real time leveraging hundreds of compute nodes. Being able to share and analyze data at this speed will only accelerate cloud adoption from this use case, while making HPC performance more accessible across a wide variety of industries.”