Quadrics - Company History

Company History

The Quadrics name was first used in 1993 for a commercialized version of the APE100 SIMD parallel computer produced by Alenia Spazio and originally developed by INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. In 1996, a new Alenia subsidiary, Quadrics Supercomputers World (QSW) was formed, based in Bristol, UK and Rome, Italy, inheriting the Quadrics SIMD product line and the Meiko CS-2 massively parallel supercomputer architecture. In 2002 the company name was shortened to be simply Quadrics.

Initially, the new company focussed on the development potential of the CS-2's processor interconnect technology. Their first design was the Elan2 network ASIC, intended for use with the UltraSPARC CPU, attached to it using the UPA system bus. Plans to introduce the Elan2 were later dropped, and a new Elan3 hosted on PCI introduced instead. By the time of its release Elan3 had been re-aimed at the Alpha/PCI market instead, after Quadrics had formed a relationship with DEC.

The combination of Quadrics and Alpha 21264 (EV6) microprocessors proved very successful, and Digital/Compaq rapidly became one of the world's largest suppliers of supercomputers. This culminated with the building the largest machine in the USA, the 20 TFLOP ASCI Q, installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory during 2002 and 2003. The machine consisted of 2,048 AlphaServer SC nodes (which are based on AlphaServer ES45), each with four 1.25 GHz Alpha 21264A (EV67) microprocessors and two rails of the Quadrics QsNet network.

Quadrics also had success in selling Linux based systems. Quadrics' first Linux based system was installed in June/July 2001 at SHARCNET. It was the fastest civilian system in Canada at the time of installation. Another high profile Quadrics system was the fastest Linux cluster in the world called Thunder installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003/2004, Thunder consisted of 1024 Intel Tiger Quad Itanium II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 teraflops on parallel Linpack. Peak performance of the system was 22.9 teraflops, at a level of efficiency of 87%.

In 2004 Quadrics was selected by Bull for what will be the fastest supercomputer in Europe: TERA-10 at the French CEA: 544 Bull NovaScale 6160 computing nodes, each including eight Itanium 2 processors. The global configuration will feature 8,704 processors with 27 terabytes of core memory. Each of these computing nodes will contain multiple Quadrics QsNetII (Elan4) network adapters to deliver over 60 teraflops (sixty thousands billions of operations per second).

Quadrics was selected by HP for the upgrade of SHARCNET, the Canadian Cluster of Clusters, with four new high-performance computing clusters that would increase the network's capacity from 1,000 to 6,000 processors. QsNetII was used for one capacity and one capability cluster.

In August 2005 Quadrics and STMicroelectronics signed a development agreement. The cooperation will cover the design of a future generations of Quadrics high speed multi gigabit interconnect, and the exploitation of the products in a range of high volume applications.

The decision to close the company was made in April 2009, despite the next-generation QsNetIII product being very close to completion. Support for older products and the IP rights were transferred to Vega UK Ltd, and the Quadrics offices were closed on June 29, 2009. Many of Quadrics' technical Staff have since found similar employment in developing HPC networking products with Gnodal, one of the many fabless semiconductor companies based in Bristol in the UK.