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SEASONED ENGINEERS TEAM UP FOR G5 PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Small Tree Communications, an Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota-based company, has unveiled a link aggregation mechanism to be used by Apple customers desirous of improved networking for the Apple G5 platform.

The Terascale Cluster project, consisting of 1,100 G5s at Virginia Tech, has sparked a buzz around the 64-bit, dual processor Mac computer.

In addition, the work at Apple has attracted numerous engineers with 64-bit computing experience, many of them recently laid off from major corporations like SGI and Cray.

Highly knowledgeable of the Unix-based code that the Mac OS X runs on, these experts saw an opportunity to forge a relationship with Apple to write the code for the new G5 platform and consequently joined Small Tree Communications.

Small Tree has formed a software-only mechanism that allows users to merge multiple Ethernet ports into a single logical port. Such an option gives system administrators more bandwidth, better availability and efficiency in using all the ports in the network. Also, administrators will be able to increase bandwidth capabilities and the dependability of network links among G5 servers and switches.

Industry leaders feel that some places are ignoring the growing popularity of smaller businesses like Small Tree. Hypothetically, if a state were to give small business adminstration-type guarantees to local banks, entrepreneurs would be more apt to make it through their crucial first year and provide more jobs in the future than a large firm would.

Still, Small Tree has little need to worry. The input they received at a recent Macworld conference has been very positive. Their experience and progress is virtually unparalleled.