Introduction
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1
Introduction
This chapter provides a description of the Mellanox Grid Director 4700 chassis and its system
boards.
1.1
Mellanox Grid Director™ 4700 Overview
Mellanox’s fourth-generation Grid Director™ 4000 series of smart switches addresses the
growing size and complexity of clusters by providing high interconnect bandwidth, advanced
carrier-class management and a unique HyperScale™ stackable architecture.
The Grid Director™ 4700 is a high performance, ultra low latency and fully non-blocking
InfiniBand switch for high performance clusters. With configurations of up to 324 ports or
double-sided 648 ports of 40 Gb/s per port InfiniBand connectivity, the Grid Director 4700
delivers an impressive 51.8 Tb/s of non-blocking bandwidth with between 100 and 300
nanoseconds of port-to-port latency. Additionally the switch’s 648 ports can be divided
between two racks for weight distribution and greater ease of cabling.
The switch’s HyperScale architecture provides a unique inter-switch link capability for
stacking multiples of 324 ports to form highly scalable, cost effective, and low latency fabrics.
As a result, I/O bottlenecks are removed, allowing applications to operate at maximum
efficiency. As the industry’s largest QDR switching solution, the efficient Grid Director
4700’s smart design provides unprecedented levels of performance and makes it easy to build
clusters that can scale out to thousands of nodes.
