Voltaire last week announced that HP will add Voltaire’s InfiniBand interconnect technology to the high-performance clusters it sells.

Voltaire makes InfiniBand host channel adapters and switch routers. In a reseller agreement, HP will add them to its configure-to-order Linux clusters.

HP sells a variety of cluster configurations based on its ProLiant and Itanium 2 servers. One customer, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), uses a 64-node cluster of HP rx2600 servers to test software and perform compute-intensive scientific applications. The rx2600 uses the Itanium 2 processor.

Several other customers have adopted HP/Voltaire Linux clusters. Among them are Shanghai University, which installed 174 HP ProLiant DL360 servers, and the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique in France, which installed a 60-node cluster of ProLiant DL585 four-processor Opteron servers.

InfiniBand is a high-speed, low-latency server interconnect technology. When InfiniBand was initially standardized, it was thought to be the new standard way to interconnect servers and storage. However, that did not become true. InfiniBand was quickly relegated to niche applications such as Linux clustering at national laboratories and universities.

Voltaire’s ISR 9288 is a 288-port 10G bit/sec switch router that has hot-swappable components and redundant management blades. The company also has the 24-port ISR 9024 switch router for use in smaller InfiniBand clusters and the ISR 6000, a multiprotocol InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel switch router. In addition, the company makes the HCA 400LP host channel adapter, which is installed in a server or workstation. The HCA has drivers for Linux and Windows host computers.