Converged Fabrics

Converged Fabrics is a solution for simplifying data center management by consolidating all communication (LAN, SAN, and Cluster) onto a single fabric, in contrast to the more complex and costly approach of using proprietary fabrics for inter-process communication (IPC) and storage. Converged Fabrics consolidates server/IPC (e.g. MPI), storage I/O (file and block), and network traffic (TCP/IP) over a common interconnect. This solution is also known as “unified fabric”, or “fabric consolidation”. The common interconnect can be either Infiniband (IB) or 10 GigE, and should have sufficient speed to enable consolidation.

We expect the converged fabrics technology to significantly lower infrastructure and management costs without sacrificing performance. In order to better understand the characteristics and analyze the behavior of the datacenter with converged fabric technology, we have established a converged fabrics lab. HP is current working with users to simulate various HPC workloads in order to obtain real-world metrics on different converged fabrics implementations.