Prius racing?? I’ve heard of it being done. I’m told that gas mileage gets factored into the race standings, but it sounds pretty dull. The fact is that “green” and “speed” don’t usually go together.

Which is why I was intrigued by two InfiniBand articles that recently appeared. Taken together, they report that IB is both the fastest server interconnect, and has the greatest potential to increase data center power efficiency as well.

Here’s what they said:

1)   The Register reported in this June 29 article, titled InfiniBand to outpace Ethernet’s unstoppable force, that “InfiniBand, more than Ethernet, has kept pace with the exploding core counts in servers and massive storage arrays to feed them, which demand massive amounts of I/O bandwidth in the switches that link them.”

Not only has IB been ahead on past speed transitions but already has specs in place for speeds to 312Gbps, and for  new encoding mechanisms that will use that performance much more efficiently, consuming just 3% of the bandwidth for overhead.

OK, we knew IB is fast. That’s why it is used in 37% MORE of the TOP500 supercomputing sites than it was just one year ago. But green, too?

2) Google researchers reported an energy savings analysis in a  June 19 journal paper, titled Energy Proportional Datacenter Networks.

When you’re building data centers near dams, as Google is, you’re probably doing some serious thinking about saving power. So what green technology did they reveal in this paper? InfiniBand.

They discussed the concept of “energy proportional,” which essentially means, “use less power when you can.” Their finding was that servers are getting better in this respect, but that networks are not. In terms of power, networks “are always on regardless of whether they are flowing data packets, because they must still send idle packets,” they report.

The implication of this is that “the datacenter network can become a significant fraction (up to 50%) of cluster power.”

The answer is to design a network whose power consumption is more proportional to the amount of traffic it is moving.

Here they found that IB technology has designed-in capabilities ideally suited to this power-saving goal. The IB architecture includes provisions that make it possible to shut down inactive lanes — and thereby reduce power — when they’re not required. Power savings in a scaled-down performance mode can reach 60%, enough to save $3M over four years in a 3400 node data center.

Faster and Greener

So it is possible to go fast and save energy doing it. Which I guess isn’t too surprising. Porsche after all is showing a hybrid that does 0-60 in about 3 sec.

But that car will cost over $600K. That same money will buy about 1,000 of the world’s fastest server I/O cards.  And they just happen to be the most efficient ones, too.