Force10 Networks Terascale E-Series Switch/Routers Power Fastest Supercomputers

Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today announced that it provides the high performance foundation for 41 of the fastest supercomputers in the world, including six of the top 15, according to the 30th edition of the TOP500 list. Highest on the list of supercomputers that the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers anchors is German research center Forschungszentrum Jülich’s newest supercomputer, which ranks second in the world and is the most powerful in Europe. “More and more of the world’s fastest supercomputers are relying on Force10’s TeraScale E-Series to provide the industry’s highest density and resiliency,” said Sachi Sambandan, vice president of engineering at Force10 Networks. “As supercomputers grow more powerful it is increasingly important to minimize the bottlenecks that can occur, and that’s where we provide the necessary scalability and reliability to continually expand the frontiers of what these machines can achieve.” Force10 powers three of the top six IBM BlueGene supercomputers at Forschungszentrum Jülich (#2), the New York Center for Computational Sciences at Stony Brook/Brookhaven National Laboratory (#10) and the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Renssalear Polytechnic Institute (#12). Additionally, four of the five fastest Dell cluster computers — at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (#14), Sandia National Laboratories (#18), Texas Advanced Computing Center (#22) and the Louisiana Optical Networking Initiative (#32) — utilize the TeraScale E-Series to build reliable Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks and achieve the throughput necessary to attain these rankings. With research environments and national laboratories demanding more computational power, supercomputers continue to increase in size. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series provides the reliability and scalability that are needed to optimize supercomputer performance and enhance state-of-the-art of research and analysis. 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 current list is available at www.top500.org.