INTERCONNECTS

Bristol, UK, Quadrics, announced today the support of its QsNet high performance network products for Intel® Itanium® 2 processor and Intel Xeon™ processor-based platforms. QsNet provides a high capability solution, offering low-latency, high bandwidth and scalability, for building Linux cluster systems. A number of QsNet systems supporting these processors are already being used in production environments. "Quadrics is pleased with the performance results of Intel's new Itanium® 2 processor, and we continue to work closely with Intel to ensure the entire family of QsNet products is fully compatible with future Intel-based server products," said Drazen Stilinovic, General Manager of Quadrics. "The deployment of very large Linux clusters is increasing as a means to deliver Supercomputing performance and reliability at more cost-effective rates, Quadrics continues to work together with industrial leaders such as Intel to provide customers with best-in-class high performance networking solutions." "The industry and Intel are making great progress building enterprise solutions based on the Itanium 2 processor," said John Woodget, director of Intel's computing and solution marketing group for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "Numerous enterprise and supercomputing applications will benefit from the powerful combination of the Itanium 2 processor and Quadric’s interconnect solution. Intel-based servers deliver compelling price performance in an era where cost effectiveness is vital to all sectors of industry.” QsNet offers a highly integrated, PCI connection for use in servers based on either PCI or PCI-X providing superior performance. The Quadrics’ host adaptor provides over 320 Mbytes/sec bandwidth and close to 2 us DMA latency for Intel architectures. Multiple adaptors can be used to provide even more bandwidth if required. Future Quadrics products, based on the Quadrics next generation PCI-X ASIC for QsNet II will continue to address the capability required for HPC. The Itanium 2 processor is the second in the Itanium processor family, a line of enterprise-class processors from Intel that brings the performance and volume economics of Intel Architecture to the most data-intensive business-critical and technical computing applications. Itanium 2-based servers and workstations deliver up to twice the performance of Itanium-based systems, and the Itanium 2 processor is socket-compatible with two future generations of Itanium family processors to allow them to be easily swapped into existing Itanium 2-based systems.