Milpitas, CA – Force10 Networks, Inc. today announced that the Grid Technology Research Center (GTRC) at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (Tsukuba, Japan) has deployed Force10 E-Series switch/routers as the central interconnection facility for a computing cluster designed for petascale, data-intensive computing. “Ethernet provides high-performance cluster communications, and is interoperable with the wide area network,” said Mr. Satoshi Sekiguchi, director of the Grid Technology Research Center (GTRC) at AIST. “And 10-Gigabit Ethernet provides high bandwidth for replicating large-scale databases, making it possible to share the large-scale data efficiently. We deployed the Force10 E-Series switch/router because it has the performance and scalability we needed for our cluster solution.” The primary objective of the GTRC is to perform research on Grid technology in areas of high performance computing, networking, database, and applications. The GTRC utilizes a high-performance computing system and large-scale databases to accelerate the dramatic advancement and systemization of grid technology. The Grid Datafarm project at GTRC provides a parallel cluster-of-cluster file system with online petascale storage, scalable I/O bandwidth, and scalable parallel processing by exploiting local I/O in a grid of clusters with tens of thousands of nodes.