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S2io Helps Caltech Team Set New Performance Record At SC 2004

S2io Inc announced that its Xframe product played a key role in setting a new record for sustained performance in the recently concluded Bandwidth Challenge held at this year's Supercomputing Conference in Pittsburgh. The Fifth Annual Bandwidth Challenge was designed to present a real application that requires massive network resources and demonstrate it on the show floor during SC2004.

Leading the effort was the "High Energy Physics" team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers from the California Institute of Technology and their partners at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Fermilab, CERN and the University of Florida, as well as international participants from the UK (University of Manchester and UKLight), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University and the State University of Sao Paolo) and Korea (Kyungpook National University). The record data transfer speed was equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of Congress in 15 minutes.

"The pace of progress is amazing here; achieving a four-fold increase in network performance in only 12 months is about 3 times faster than Moore's Law," said Dave Zabrowski, president and CEO of S2io. "And the potential is enormous, as server systems scale, we will see more of these breakthrough records in the future, led by Caltech and their partners, using S2io's Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet superior technology."

The show floor network included the Caltech booth featuring Cisco Systems switches connected to seven-10 Gbps links and three-10 Gbps links at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center/Fermilab booth. The external network connections included 4 dedicated wavelengths of National Lambda Rail between the show floor and Los Angeles (2 waves), Chicago, and Jacksonville, as well as three-10 Gbps connections across the SciNet network infrastructure to Abilene, the TeraGrid and ESnet. During the test, the network links over both the Abilene and ESnet networks were shown to operate successfully up to 99 percent of full capacity achieving sustained throughput of 101.13 Gbps.

"This has been the third occasion where S2io has joined us to help our team establish a new performance record," noted Harvey Newman, professor of physics at Caltech. "But this was not just about performance. It's about changing the model of physics research by allowing virtual teams to work together to view and share massive amounts of data in real time."

These record-breaking hybrid networks featuring unprecedented levels of seamless interconnectivity enable the simultaneous transmission and reception of multiple 10 Gbps paths. This enormous bandwidth offers immediate benefits to physicists who need to analyze and share many Petabytes of data as they explore the origins of the universe, super-symmetry and natural phenomena that affect the space/time continuum.

Although not being the only adapters utilized by the High Energy Physics team, S2io's Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters contributed to over 75 percent of the bandwidth in the record.