NVIDIA Mellanox SX6536-NR 648-Port 56Gb/s FDR InfiniBand Director Switch (29U chassis): This is a modular chassis InfiniBand director switch built around Mellanox SwitchX-2 silicon, providing up to 648 non-blocking 56Gb/s FDR ports in a 29U form factor. It is a fully populated chassis used as a fabric core or aggregation tier for very large InfiniBand clusters. This is not a 1U fixed-port edge switch and is not an Ethernet director — port mode is InfiniBand. This is a refurbished unit, professionally tested by T.E.S IT-SOLUTIONS.
Engineering Context
The SX6536-NR delivers up to 72.5 Tb/s of full bisectional switching bandwidth across all 648 QSFP ports, with sub-1µs port-to-port latency on the FDR fabric. The director is a 5-stage Clos topology built from leaf and spine line cards interconnected over a passive midplane, eliminating external cabling between leaf and spine tiers. As supplied here the chassis includes 36× MSX6001FR 18-port FDR leaf blades, 18× MSX6002FLR 36-port FDR spine blades and 1× MSX6000MAR PPC460-based InfiniBand management module. SwitchX-2 supports adaptive routing, congestion control and lossless forwarding with hardware-based subnet management offload.
Deployment & Use Cases
Spine of large-scale HPC clusters spanning multiple racks. Aggregation tier in academic and national-lab supercomputing fabrics. Financial trading and risk-modelling infrastructures requiring tight tail-latency. Storage fabric core in Lustre, GPFS and BeeGFS environments. Multi-rack AI and HPC training fabrics that exceed the port count of leaf-only deployments.
Technical Specifications
OEM: NVIDIA Mellanox
Part Number: SX6536-NR
Ports: 648 × QSFP (FDR)
Per-Port Data Rate: 56 Gb/s (FDR)
Aggregate Switching Bandwidth: 72.5 Tb/s non-blocking
Port-to-Port Latency: sub-1 µs
Switch Silicon: SwitchX-2
Form Factor: 29U modular chassis
Leaf Modules Included: 36 × MSX6001FR (18-port FDR leaf)
Spine Modules Included: 18 × MSX6002FLR (36-port FDR spine)
Management Module: 1 × MSX6000MAR (PPC460 InfiniBand manager)
Condition: Refurbished — Tested by T.E.S IT-SOLUTIONS
Compatibility & Hard Constraints
Operates in InfiniBand FDR mode — it does not run as a 56GbE Ethernet director. Compatible with NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-3, ConnectX-3 Pro and ConnectX-4 InfiniBand adapters, and with FDR fabric-aware OFED drivers and OpenSM. Power, cabling and rack depth must accommodate a fully populated 29U chassis. Replacement of leaf, spine or management modules requires matching MSX600x-series blades; mixing other generations (SX6510, SX6512) inside the same chassis is not supported. Optical and copper cabling must be FDR-rated; QDR DAC and AOC cables will train at a downgraded link speed.
Why Choose T.E.S IT-SOLUTIONS
T.E.S IT-SOLUTIONS power-cycles, link-tests and validates each leaf, spine and management blade in this director chassis before shipment. We provide expert consultation on InfiniBand director topology, subnet management and global shipping with 1–3 business day handling. Visit https://www.tes-itsolutions.com for the full inventory.