ACADEMIA

Seattle, Washington, and Mountain View, Calif.- Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, and the University of Washington, today announced the deployment of Topspin’s InfiniBand-based Switched Computing Systems in support of the university’s digital video media library. The Topspin 360 switched computing system is being used to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity within the university’s Intel-based streaming media server clusters and between these clusters and their Fibre Channel SANs for digital video archives and Ethernet LANs for connectivity to clients. “The University of Washington plans to scale its Digital Well archive out to include Petabytes of high-quality video content for distance learning,” said Nate McQueen, System Architect in the Advanced Systems Technology Group at the University of Washington. “Our initial InfiniBand clustering tests show dramatic improvements in scalability and image quality versus clustering the same streaming servers over Ethernet. We’re seeing 40 percent more streams with the same server hardware. The InfiniBand cluster consumes 50 percent less processing power for the same number of streams. We chose Topspin because they have the most comprehensive InfiniBand hardware and software solution set we’ve seen, including InfiniBand cluster switches with integrated InfiniBand to Fibre Channel and Ethernet gateways to interface with our SANs and LANs.” “We are pleased that the University of Washington has selected Topspin,” said Stu Aaron, vice president of marketing and business development at Topspin. “They’re a leading adopter of InfiniBand technology in the educational market, and their streaming application illustrates how InfiniBand and switched computing solve real-world problems today.” “The University of Washington is benefiting from the scalability of Intel architecture server clusters interconnected within an InfiniBand fabric,” said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing, Intel Enterprise Platform Group. “With increased performance and lower CPU utilization, the Digital Well can serve more users with the same hardware infrastructure showcasing the power of Intel Xeon processor based servers.”