HPE Cray EX supercomputers use which interconnect technology to reduce latency and maximize bandwidth?

HPE Cray EX supercomputers are architected with the HPE Slingshot interconnect. This technology is specifically designed for the demands of exascale-era high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. Slingshot is an Ethernet-based fabric that provides 200 Gbps of bandwidth per port, extremely low-latency communication, and sophisticated congestion control mechanisms. These features are critical for maximizing application performance and system efficiency on the massive scale of a Cray EX system, directly addressing the question's criteria of reducing latency and maximizing bandwidth.

A. Ethernet 10Gb offers drastically insufficient bandwidth and lacks the specialized low-latency and congestion management features required for a modern supercomputer interconnect.

B. InfiniBand is a common HPC interconnect technology, but it is a competitor to Slingshot. HPE Cray EX systems are specifically designed and integrated with the HPE Slingshot fabric.

D. Fibre Channel is a protocol primarily used for high-speed data transfer in Storage Area Networks (SANs) and is not designed or used as a general-purpose compute interconnect in HPC systems.

1. HPE Cray EX Supercomputer Data Sheet. (Document ID: a00106232enw

Published: November 2022). Page 2

under the "System interconnect" section

explicitly states: "HPE Slingshot interconnect with 200 Gb/s links in a Dragonfly topology."

2. HPE Slingshot Interconnect White Paper. (Document ID: a00103335enw

Published: June 2020). Page 1

Introduction

states: "HPE Slingshot is the world’s only high-performance network designed for the exascale era... It is a key component of the HPE Cray EX supercomputer architecture."

3. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Frontier User Guide

Section 1.1 System Overview. The documentation for the Frontier supercomputer

an HPE Cray EX system

specifies its architecture: "The compute nodes are connected by the HPE Slingshot-11 interconnect." This serves as an official deployment example from a reputable institution.