ACADEMIA

Taiwan's preeminent education institution, Academia Sinica, has selected Extreme Networks scalable data center switches as part of a network upgrade to support the demands of its supercomputing cloud network.

Academia Sinica selected Extreme Networks versatile and highly dense switches to gain a robust and reliable 10 Gigabit network that is capable of continuously transferring huge volumes of data in continuous periods and would ultimately scale to 100 Gigabit Ethernet.

Extreme Networks supports global leading universities and research institutions such as the Wellcome Sanger Trust Institute, Johns Hopkins University and CEA Saclay.  At Academica Sinica, a team of physicists within the Academia Sinica Grids (ASG) research area are analyzing the particles created in collisions within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. To support the LHC as part of a worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project, as well as other research initiatives, ASGC implemented more than 2,500 blade servers from Extreme Networks in its supercomputer facility.

"We were already using Extreme Networks technology, but when we evaluated vendors' switching gear capable of expanding the network to accommodate HPC architecture, we sought great price-performance backed by fast delivery. Extreme Networks offering ticked all the boxes, and we had experienced excellent service from them in the past," said Wen-Shui Chen, network manager for ASG. "The BlackDiamond is a great fit for large and dense networks."

ASG is Extreme Networks largest blade server customer in Taiwan, with 52 racks in 135m^2. With more than 5.4petabytes of storage capacity including disk and tape, it also represents one of Taiwan's largest data centers. ASGC is using Extreme Networks BlackDiamond 8900 series fabric switches, comprising a BlackDiamond 8810 chassis fully loaded with BlackDiamond 8900 module cards.

"Scientific and research facilities such as Academia Sinica need to be able to analyze immense amounts of real-time data from myriad sources in order to make real-time decisions. Having a flexible, high-performance core network and data center is critical to HPC applications," said Huy Nguyen, director of product management for Extreme Networks. "An Ethernet-based HPC interconnect like Extreme Networks offers data-intensive organizations a significant advantage due to its cost-effectiveness, ubiquity and open standards."