ACADEMIA

SCinet Puts Next Generation Ethernet Ecosystem On Display; Includes First Public Demonstration of NFS over RDMA: NetEffect, the leader in next generation Ethernet connectivity solutions, today announced its 10Gb iWARP Ethernet channel adapters (ECAs), the NE010e, are being used to provide high-performance connectivity to SCinet, one of the world's most advanced computer networks. NetEffect is demonstrating NFS running over RDMA, another example of the growing support among software providers for the OpenFabrics software stack running on iWARP Ethernet. This open software standard allows commercial applications to achieve high performance without regard to the underlying transport, whether 10Gb Ethernet, InfiniBand or a future alternative. SCinet is built on-site at SC06, the premier international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, taking place November 11 - 17. NetEffect has developed the industry's highest performing Ethernet channel adapter and is the only company delivering adapters that fully implement the iWARP Ethernet standard, allowing data center managers to realize 10Gbps throughput using existing Ethernet hardware and software. SCinet combines leading-edge hardware and high-speed wide-area communication links to provide conference exhibitors and attendees with world-class connectivity to national and international networks. SCinet features a 10Gb iWARP Ethernet infrastructure, which includes hardware from leading vendors together with OpenFabrics software and supporting services. This combination provides a powerful infrastructure demonstrating the advantages iWARP Ethernet delivers for clustered computing, server-to-server processing, and visualization. "NetEffect, in conjunction with leading server, switch, and commercial software providers, is ushering in a new era in the history of the ubiquitous Ethernet standard," said Rick Maule, CEO of NetEffect. "This ecosystem is growing around support for iWARP Ethernet, which virtually eliminates CPU overhead associated with networking while dramatically reducing latency for clustering and increasing throughput for storage. Since it is fully compatible with previous generations of Ethernet, it is non-disruptive to existing Ethernet infrastructures. This year has been a watershed year of progress for 10Gb iWARP Ethernet as we've seen it become a fully deployable technology." "We have demonstrated achievement of one of the key objectives of the OpenFabrics Alliance in the NFS over RDMA demonstration by developing a software stack that is RDMA transport independent and simultaneously supports InfiniBand and iWARP Ethernet," said Bill Boas, vice-chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance. "There is strong interest in this demonstration because of the exceptional bandwidth and very low CPU utilization achieved by NFS over RDMA. The NetEffect NE010e adapter's high packet processing rate and full iWARP implementation make it well suited to high performance applications as we are demonstrating today." "The NFS over RDMA demonstration over SCinet is a key technology demonstration at SC06. While today's demonstration is intended to show technology feasibility, Sandia is investing in this technology because we believe it will provide greater bandwidth, with lower CPU utilization than other protocols," said Helen Chen, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. "We are pleased to have NetEffect play a key role in this demonstration." NetEffect is a founding member of the OpenFabrics Alliance its Web site, an industry consortium developing transport agnostic open source software for RDMA fabric technologies.