Mellanox’s (MLNX) InfiniBand Supports NEC’s New HPC System

Mellanox Technologies Ltd. MLNX recently announced a collaboration with NEC Corporation to provide support to the latter’s newly announced SX-Aurora TSUBASA systems with its InfiniBand adapters.

InfiniBand is highly scalable and its off-loading capabilities that reduce load on CPUs are attracting artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning providers.

The addition of InfiniBand to NEC’s latest high-end high-performance computing (HPC) platform boosts the systems processing performance and scalability. The enhanced features allow the system to tackle computational problems related to the emerging field of AI and its subsets machine learning and Big Data analytics.

InfiniBand Adoption Remains Strong

NEC’s choice of using InfiniBand reflects rapid adoption of the interconnect solution. According to Mellanox, which quoted the TOP500 list, InfiniBand connected 77% of the new HPC systems in the June-November time frame. It connects 60% of the HPC TOP500 systems.

Moreover, InfiniBand has been the preferred interconnect for AI and deep learning systems. Earlier this year, Mellanox announced that leading deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe2, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, and Baidu PaddlePaddle use the company’s offloading capability across multiple AI servers.

Mellanox also recorded design wins on multiple platforms this year. These design wins include more than 20 AI projects globally, which is significant for the company’s top-line growth, in our view.

Collaborations Expand Customer Base

Apart from strong demand for Mellanox’s InfiniBand solutions, collaborations with the likes of Atos, VMware VMW and Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE have helped the company expand its footprint in the cloud and datacenter market.

Mellanox has partnered with VMware to combine iSER (iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access) networking solutions with vSphere. The company’s iSER uses an Ethernet Storage Fabric as a unified connectivity solution for compute and storage. This provides improved performance at lower costs.

Mellanox has also partnered with Hewlett Packard, per which the former’s ConnectX-5 InfiniBand adapters and Switch-IB2 InfiniBand switches were used in the latter’s HPE SGI 8600 and HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 systems.

Frequent Contract Wins a Tailwind

Mellanox is winning contracts from the likes of NetApp NTAP. The network storage provider recently selected Mellanox’s ConnectX 100Gb/s InfiniBand adapters for two of its most advanced storage platforms – the EF570 and E5700.

Most recently, the University of Toronto selected the Mellanox InfiniBand solutions to accelerate its new leading supercomputer in Canada. Earlier, the NASA Ames Research Center selected the company’s EDR InfiniBand solutions along with HPE SGI 8600 liquid cooled platform to expand its “Electra” supercomputing cluster.

Additionally, Mellanox’s collaboration with Microsemi Corporation is also expected to solidify the company’s footprint in the high performance computing market going forward.

Zacks Rank

Mellanox carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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