INTERCONNECTS

Force10 Networks announced that its TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers powers 15 of the world's 100 fastest supercomputers, including two of the top 10, according to a list published last week by Top500.org. With industry-leading Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, combined with unmatched resiliency, the TeraScale E-Series provides the high performance scalability that is at the foundation of an increasing number of the world's fastest supercomputers. "Over the last several iterations of the Top500 list there has been a clear move to high performance infrastructures within enterprise organizations and Ethernet as the preferred technology for building those infrastructures," said Sachi Sambandan, vice president of engineering at Force10 Networks. "The increased adoption of high performance architectures within the enterprise provides Force10 with a growing addressable market and enables us to leverage our many years of experience in demanding computing environments." The current Top500 list illuminates several transitions occurring within high performance computing environments. Chief among these is a movement of supercomputing technologies from research and education organizations into the enterprise with 53 percent of the world's largest supercomputers being operated within commercial organizations from a variety of vertical markets. Additionally, nearly 50 percent of the world's fastest computing networks are connected with Ethernet while Infiniband and other proprietary solutions run a distant second. With research and education organizations developing faster supercomputers and enterprises adopting similar architectures, Force10 has steadily increased its presence amongst the world's fastest 100 supercomputers. Increasingly, companies within such vertical markets as oil and gas, financial services, media and entertainment, and weather services, are leveraging clustering technology to more efficiently utilize their computing resources. And these companies, including the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Petroleum Geo-Services, are leveraging the Force10 TeraScale E-Series to increase scalability as they expand their high performance clusters. In the current list, the top 10 fastest supercomputers all exceeded 20 Teraflops per second or 20 trillion calculations per second, and the entry point for the top 100 moved from 2.026 Teraflops one year ago to 3.98 Teraflops in the current iteration. The total combined performance of all 500 systems on the list is now 2.30 petaflops, compared to 1.127 petaflops just one year ago, and the last system on the most recent list would have ranked at 173 just one year ago. The Top500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high performance computing. Supercomputers are ranked twice a year based on performance. The latest list is available at TOP500.