SCIENCE

Solarflare Communications will showcase its family of SFP+ and 10GBASE-T 10GbE server adapters at Supercomputing 2010, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. The company will demonstrate the dramatic increase in message passing interface (MPI) application performance delivered by its 10GbE server adapters with its OpenOnload application acceleration middleware. The Solarflare solution increases MPI performance over x86 based clusters to accelerate performance of high performance computing (HPC) applications, such as finite element analysis, reservoir modeling for energy exploration, fluid dynamics and others.

Solarflare's OpenOnload software accelerates MPI operations with its 10GbE adapters and standard, commercially available 10GbE switches by reducing operating system (OS) overhead, lowering latency, increasing messaging rates and decreasing CPU utilization. The HPC computational acceleration is achieved transparently without requiring changes to the application. Solarflare's high-performance, low-latency products enable companies to build high-performance computing clusters and data centers that meet the most demanding networking challenges. Solarflare will feature its display in booth #4542, November 15-18, at the Ernest N. Moriale Convention Center in New Orleans, LA.

Solarflare's 10GbE network adapters enable companies in a wide range of industries, such as financial services, scientific computing, energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing, to achieve 50-300% performance gains. By using a Solarflare triple-speed (100mbps/1000mbps/10Gbps) 10GBASE-T adapter, HPC customers can take advantage of the performance boost offered by OpenOnload, while maintaining their investments in 1000BASE-T switches and installed cabling.

The company's products have undergone rigorous third-party and other types of performance testing, including the network file system (NFS) testing. NFS is an important open, standards-based networked storage protocol used by many HPC customers because of its ease of use and broad compatibility.

"We are working with multiple customers to speed up their x86 based clusters to accelerate performance of high performance computing (HPC) applications, such as high-frequency trading, plasma physics, reservoir modeling, and fluid dynamics, just to name a few," said Bruce Tolley, vice president of solutions marketing at Solarflare. "Through several third-party tests, including the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) performance benchmarks, Solarflare has proven that our products deliver the performance and low latency required in HPC and next-generation data centers."

Solarflare's SFN5000 line of 10GbE server adapters deliver the industry's highest-performance, lowest-power solutions that support both 10GBASE-T for installed twisted pair copper cabling and SFP+ for installed optical fiber to address the latest cloud computing and virtualized application demands. Featuring hardware-assisted support for virtualization, the family of NICs delivers up to five times the application performance of other server adapters by accelerating virtual I/O for Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.