QsNet is a high speed interconnect designed by Quadrics used in HPC clusters, particularly Linux Beowulf Clusters. Although it can be used with TCP/IP; like SCI, Myrinet and Infiniband it is usually used with a communication API such as MPI or SHMEM called from a parallel program. This is an article about the computing company, for use in mathematics, see quadric. ... HPC may stand for: House Price Crash High-performance computing High-performance Peripheral Controller Handheld PC, Microsofts specification for handheld devices This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page—a list of articles associated with the same title. ... Linux Cluster at Purdue University. ... The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the McGill University pulsar group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars. ... SCI may stand for: Sales Curve Interactive, a video game developer Scalable Coherent Interconnect Science Citation Index Sensitive Compartmented Information Serial Communication Interface Service Civil International Sierras Creative Interpreter Society of Chemical Industry Spinal cord injury Structure Conservation Index Science (as in comp sci or bio sci) String Cheese... Myrinet, ANSI/VITA 26-1998, is a high-speed local area networking system designed by Myricom to be used as an interconnect between multiple machines to form computer clusters. ... InfiniBand is a high-speed serial computer bus, intended for both internal and external connections. ... API may refer to: In computing, application programming interface In petroleum industry, American Petroleum Institute In education, Academic Performance Index This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. ... Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain results faster. ...

The interconnect consists of a PCI card in each compute node and one or more a dedicated switch chasses. These are connected with a copper cables. Within the switch chassis are a number of line cards that carry Elite switch ASICs. These are internally linked to form a fat tree topology. Like other interconnects such as Myrinet very large systems can be build by using multiple switch chasses arranged as spine (top-level) and leaf (node-level) switches. Such systems are usually called federated networks. The acronym ASIC, depending on context, may stand for: Application-specific integrated circuit ASIC programming language Australian Securities and Investments Commission This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The Fat-Tree network, invented by Charles Leiserson of MIT, is a universal network for provably efficient communication. ... Myrinet, ANSI/VITA 26-1998, is a high-speed local area networking system designed by Myricom to be used as an interconnect between multiple machines to form computer clusters. ...

As of 2003, there are two generations of QsNet. The older QsNetI was launched in 1998 and used PCI 66-64 cards that had 'elan3' Custom ASIC on them. These gave an MPI bandwitdh of around 350MByte/s unidirectional with 5us latency. QsNet II was launched in 2003. It used PCI-X 133MHz cards that carry 'elan4' ASICs. These give an MPI bandwitdh of 912MByte/s and MPI latency starting from 1.22 us, performance depends on platform used. QsNetII is the latest generation of Quadrics interconnect family products. ... For other meanings of PCI, see PCI (disambiguation). ...

In 2004 Quadrics started releasing small to medium switch stand-alone switch configurations called QsNetII E-Series, these configurations range from the 8 to the 128-way systems.

External links

• Quadrics website
• Quadrics QsNet Page
• Quadrics 8-way