ACADEMIA

KeyEye Communications, Inc. today announced that its 10 gigabits-per-second (10 Gbps) copper media transceivers are playing a key role in the SCinet 05 InfiniBand demonstration network at SC|05, the premier international conference for high performance computing, networking, and storage. Together with market leaders Cisco Systems, Inc. and Mellanox Technologies, KeyEye is demonstrating the feasibility of linking data center systems using commonly available, lightweight, and flexible Category 6 copper cabling rather than bulky and expensive twinaxial InfiniBand cabling. Also, by extending reach to 30 meters, this approach allows data centers to build larger scale clusters and expand their network, computing, and storage resources. In Cisco booth #2218, the SCinet network connects to Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand Server Switches. Four 4X InfiniBand links connect, via InfiniBand cable, to four KeyEye KX1003 transceivers, where 4X InfiniBand communication converts to Category 6 copper cable. Four Category 6 cables transmit the data to another Cisco rack, where another four KeyEye KX1003 transceivers convert the signal back to InfiniBand. These four InfiniBand signals communicate to four Mellanox host channel adapters (HCAs) in Dell servers. “The SCinet network demonstrates the breakthrough benefits of 10 Gbps structured copper cabling interconnects,” noted Harvey Scull, KeyEye president and CEO. “By enabling 4X InfiniBand communication using Category 6 cabling, KeyEye transceivers allow system integrators to provide larger server clusters and at lower costs.” “Cisco is committed to providing the best technology solutions possible for server-to-server interconnects,” said Stu Aaron, senior director of product management, Server Networking and Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco. “Demonstrations of new technology such as the 4X InfiniBand over Category 6 at the Supercomputing 2005 conference will help to bring InfiniBand technology to a wider range of datacenter environments including research grids, high performance server clusters, and enterprise utility data centers.” “The usage of Category 6 cables for InfiniBand interconnect is a key vision that will ease the deployment of large server and storage grids in data centers by using familiar, easy-to-use, cabling infrastructure,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies. “KeyEye’s KX1003 demonstration is a promising technology that can accelerate the adoption of InfiniBand into mainstream enterprise applications.”