INTERCONNECTS

Force10 Networks today announced that the TeraScale E-Series powers seven of the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, including one in the top five, according to a list published last Wednesday by Top500.org that ranks the performance of the world's fastest computers. In all, 23 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world rely on the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers. Most notably, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series anchors the MareNostrum cluster installed at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center in Spain, delivering the reliability and predictable performance the national supercomputing center needs to conduct scientific research on medicine, climate change, contagious diseases and materials science. Ranked fifth on the updated list, the MareNostrum cluster is Europe's fastest supercomputer with a capacity of 27.91 Teraflops per second. Over the next four years, the Spanish government will invest EUR 70 million (approximately $89 million) to continue building out the supercomputing center. "A greater percentage of the world's fastest computers are relying on Ethernet to interconnect computer nodes or processors, making high Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet density and reliability essential," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. "As enterprises increasingly adopt similar clustering architectures for large data center build outs, Force10 is committed to delivering the unmatched resiliency and predictable performance necessary to bring the benefits of cluster computing to enterprise customers." The new list confirms that the architectures and technologies adopted by the research and education communities several years ago are now more widely deployed. There are now 304 systems categorized as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the Top500. Ethernet also dominated the list with 42.4 percent of all entries leveraging the cost-effective technology to interconnect their processors, an increase from 35.2 percent in November 2004. As further proof that high performance computing architectures are moving into the enterprise, 52.8 percent of the entries are in commercial industries. For the first time, all systems on the list exceeded one Teraflop per second, and the total combined performance of all 500 systems is now 1.69 Petaflops per second. The supercomputer that is ranked 500 on the updated list has roughly the same computational power as all 500 supercomputers on the first list created 13 years ago combined. Force10's TeraScale E-Series leads the industry in density, performance and resiliency. The TeraScale E-Series supports 1,260 Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis and can process one billion packets per second, the highest in the industry. 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 www.top500.org.