BIOLOGY

Dolphin Interconnect announces support for PCI Express with the release of two new SCI adapter cards that deliver a total throughput of 700MBytes per second plus an end-to-end latency of just over one microsecond. "Dolphin regards PCI Express as the most important innovation in the I/O field to date. It has already been widely adopted as the new I/O standard and the hardware architecture and backwards software compatibility is just right for transitioning adapters and applications. This makes its revolutionary performance potential appear like a natural evolution of the existing PCI standard," said Einar Rustad, Dolphin VP Business Development. "This standard has the potential for lasting some time, making the environment more stable and predictable for third party suppliers of I/O equipment," Rustad continued. The new Dolphin SCI PCI Express adapters are software compatible with existing Dolphin cards and switches, enabling the full range of libraries available for Dolphin SCI to be used with the new cards without any modifications. This includes Dolphin SuperSockets, Scali MPI Connect, MPICH both 1 and 2, LAM MPI, Intel MPI, Dolphin's SISCI API plus any customer developed software. With Dolphin SuperSockets, all applications communicating through TCP/UDP/IP protocols can run unmodified with the Dolphin hardware, offering users a major improvement in performance and scalability. Dolphin products support all major operating system platforms including Linux and Windows. "As more and more motherboards are delivered with PCI Express, we are seeing software compatibility as the key to providing our customers with a smooth transition to PCI Express", said Keith Murphy, Dolphin VP of Sales. "The improved bandwidth appeals to customers who need high performance for streaming of data for data acquisition or visualization purposes, while the low latency continues to lead for scalability in computer-aided engineering and database applications," Murphy continued.