World's Fastest, First Petaflops Supercomputer Uses EMCORE Connects Cables

IBM uses 55 miles of optical fiber EMCORE Connects Cables to build Roadrunner HPC system EMCORE Corporation, a leading provider of compound semiconductor-based components and subsystems for the broadband, fiber optic, satellite and terrestrial solar power markets, today announced that its optical fiber EMCORE Connects Cables (ECC) are being used by IBM on the DOE computer nicknamed Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the petaflop computing barrier. EMCORE Connects Cables are high-performance InfiniBand* interconnects that operate at high-speed 20 Gb/s data rates with and extremely low Bit Error rate of 10(-15). Due to this combination of high performance and excellent reliability, IBM chose EMCORE Connects Cables for Roadrunner, the Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration funded High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster that will be housed at it's Los Alamos National Laboratory. On June 9, the DOE announced that Roadrunner was the first system to break 1,000 trillion calculations per second mark known as the Petaflops. Stephen Krasulick, Vice President and General Manager of EMCORE's Digital Products division stated, "Two years of diligent work between the EMCORE Connects Cables team and IBM have made the era of petaflop computing a reality." Krasulick added, "EMCORE is proud to play a part in this computing milestone and to have our optical fiber EMCORE Connects Cables be the InfiniBand interconnect on the world's fastest supercomputer." EMCORE is demonstrating a new 40 Gb/s EMCORE Connects Cable in conjunction with Mellanox Technologies at the International Supercomputing conference in Dresden on June 17-19. EMCORE Connects Cables currently support both 20 Gb/s Double Data Rate (DDR) and 10 Gb/s Single Data Rate (SDR) and are available in lengths from 1 to 100 meters. For more information, visit EMCORE at its Web site.