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Procket Networks Powers Bandwidth Challenge At SC2003

Procket Networks, a leading provider of high performance Internet Protocol (IP) technology and products, announced that its PRO/8812 Routing Platform has been chosen to provide high-performance connectivity to participants in this year's Bandwidth Challenge Nov. 17-21 at the Supercomputing 2003 Conference in Phoenix. In the Bandwidth Challenge, contestants from science and engineering research communities around the world use the conference's state-of-the-art network infrastructure (SCinet) to demonstrate the latest technologies and applications requiring high-performance networking.

The SCinet PRO/8812 router is equipped with 24 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports, 20 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and eight ports of OC-192 POS. The system provides almost 380Gbps of front panel connectivity distributed among the Challenge participants and the SCinet core and marks the first time a routing platform with this capacity has been part of SCinet. Procket's PRO/1 modular routing software offers a full suite of IPv4, IPv6 and multicast connectivity, and PRO/Silicon custom VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chips provide line-rate processing for any packet type or size.

"The Bandwidth Challenge peak utilization increased five-fold from 2001 to 2002. We anticipate a significant increase in both sustained and peak utilization in Phoenix," said Greg Goddard, SC2003 BWC co-chair. "Procket's PRO/8812 solution, with its ability to process up to 960Gbps of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, will be a key architectural component of SCinet, which provides unconstrained bandwidth to research networks worldwide.

"High-performance networking shares many of the same challenges as high-performance computing," said Bill Lynch, co-founder of Procket Networks. "Scaling the processing power of any system in a predictable and economic fashion can be difficult, requiring new technologies. Procket has solved this problem in the networking industry with our in-house programmable VLSI and our PRO/1 modular software. The participants in the Bandwidth Challenge are trailblazers in high-performance network computing, and we are excited they will be using Procket technology to make their mark in the high-performance community."