ACADEMIA

Ammasso, Inc. today announced that Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)- Springfield has selected the Ammasso 1100 Ethernet Adapter for their newest High Performance Computing cluster, which is distributed over multiple sites and interconnected via a WAN. Ammasso is the leading provider of RDMA over Ethernet networking solutions for server-to-server applications including High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC), grid computing, and IP storage. OSC-Springfield focuses on data-intensive supercomputing, large-scale data mining, regional and global climate modeling, materials science, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and high-energy physics. It is a fully scalable center that acts as a resource for Ohio's scientists, engineers, and research community. Ohio's Third Frontier Network, a statewide IP-compatible optical network, provides the WAN connectivity. "We looked at several options for high performance cluster interconnect and chose RDMA over Ethernet for its WAN capabilities," said Kevin Wohlever, Project Director, OSC-Springfield. "Utilizing the Ammasso 1100 adapter and a WAN connection, we can more easily bring distributed clusters to bear on complex computational problems, similar to a grid." The Ammasso 1100 is the industry's first cluster adapter to implement the IETF iWARP protocol suite. iWARP combines the performance acceleration of RDMA, with the Internet compatible Ethernet and IP protocols. RDMA streamlines application communication between computers over a network. Before iWARP, the benefits of RDMA were only available on special-purpose, non-routable networks such as Infiniband. "OSC-Springfield is a great example of a cluster environment that benefits from iWARP's ability to leverage ubiquitous IP infrastructure," said Alan Litchfield, CEO of Ammasso. "Efficiently pooling geographically separated computing resources has tremendous potential for commercial value, including disaster tolerant scale out computing." Ammasso also announced the availability of a software update for the Ammasso 1100 Ethernet Adapter. With this release, the Ammasso 1100 now seamlessly supports routed networks such as WANs. The software only update, Version 1.2 Update 1, also added support for the industry standard Direct Access Provider Library (DAPL) and expanded the list of tested Linux distributions, including the latest offerings from Novell SUSE, and Red Hat Linux. Pricing and Availability The Ammasso 1100 version 1.2 adapter is available now at a list price of $495. For product and ordering information, go to its Web site or email sales@ammasso.com.