APPLICATIONS

MILPITAS, CA – Force10 Networks Inc., the leader in high performance Ethernet systems, announced that its E-Series chassis with line-rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet performance has been chosen by the majority of Bandwidth Challenge participants to power their entries into this year’s bandwidth contest at SC2002. In addition SCinet, the high-performance network built to support the SC2002 conference and the Bandwidth Challenge, will be using the E-Series to deliver 10GigE connectivity to the participants and test their entries. During the Bandwidth Challenge, teams of researchers from around the world will use SCinet to demonstrate applications using huge amounts of distributed data. For five of this year’s nine Bandwidth Challenge participants: Argonne National Laboratory (booth R1671); Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (booth R207); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (booth R1761); The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (booth R1459); and The San Diego Supercomputer Center (booth R1134), the Force10 E-Series will play an integral part in their application demonstrations passing massive amounts of data through SCinet. “This year the Bandwidth Challenge will create a particularly exciting network infrastructure with a backbone consisting of 10-Gigabit Ethernet and OC-192 WAN connections to the nine participants on the exhibit floor and to many high-speed national research networks,” said Bill Nickless of Argonne National Laboratory and SCinet vice chair. “For SCinet as well as the participants line-rate performance of 10GigE links is essential to ensure application traffic is not bottlenecked by the network. Force10's E1200 and E600 products, with full-line-rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet performance, provides the best possible combination of Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet capacity, perfect for the cluster-based applications we see in the Bandwidth Challenge.” The SC2002 Bandwidth Challenge demonstrates how scientific and technical applications can scale to use many gigabits/second of bandwidth. 10-Gigabit Ethernet is very important to these applications because they are already familiar with how Ethernet works, and they're often connecting their computers with many Gigabit or Fast Ethernet ports. The primary measure of performance for entries into the Bandwidth Challenge will be the verifiable network throughput as measured from the contestant's booth through the SCinet switches and routers to external connections. “We are very pleased to be playing this key role for SCinet and the Bandwidth Challenge participants,” said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Force10 Networks. “Our E-Series switch/routers were designed to deliver the unmatched scalability, line-rate performance, and robust L2 and L3 functionality required as the market for Ethernet equipment continues to move up the bandwidth curve. The fact that this year’s participants have bet their entries on Force10 is a clear sign we are delivering on our promises.”