Technical Specifications
Essentials
Supplemental Information
Networking Specifications
Reviews
Optimizations and Enhancements
Much of the improved HPC application performance and low end-to-end latency at scale comes from the following enhancements:
Enhanced Performance Scaled Messaging (PSM).
The application view of the fabric is derived heavily from—and application-level software compatible with—the demonstrated scalability of Intel® Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA) by leveraging an enhanced next generation version of the Performance Scaled Messaging (PSM) library. Major deployments by the US Department of Energy and other have proven this scalability advantage. PSM is specifically designed for the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and is very lightweight—one-tenth of the user space code—compared to using verbs. This leads to extremely high MPI and Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) message rates (short message efficiency) compared to using InfiniBand* verbs.
“Connectionless” message routing.
Intel® Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA)—based on a connectionless design—does not establish connection address information between nodes, cores, or processes while a traditional implementation maintains this information in the cache of the adapter. As a result, the connectionless design delivers consistent latency independent of the scale or messaging partners. This implementation offers greater potential to scale performance across a large node or core count cluster while maintaining low end-to-end latency as the application is scaled across the cluster.
Benchmarks for Intel® Omni-Path Architecture
See complete speed, performance, and configuration specs.
