News Briefs - Networking:

SGI Offers 10 Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity

Silicon Graphics announced that it will offer 10 Gigabit (Gb) Ethernet connectivity across its product offering of servers, workstations, advanced graphics systems and storage solutions. SGI is offering the new PCI-X adapter option for customers who increasingly need to transfer massive data sets between large systems, or as an ingest engine for huge I/O data streams. By increasing Ethernet bandwidth up to 10 times over today’s standard interconnect speeds, SGI enables those customers to move and process data via Ethernet faster than ever before.

Products now featuring 10 Gb Ethernet include SGI Altix servers and superclusters, SGI Origin servers, Silicon Graphics Tezro visual workstation, Onyx visualization systems, and SGI InfiniteStorage NAS solutions.

Customers in a broad range of advanced computing environments – including government, defense, sciences and media – are working with ever more complex data sets. Virtual cockpits used in distributed mission training, for example, process terabytes of data in real time to produce interactive visual simulations that often are driven by multiple visualization systems and displays. With 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity, transferring simulation data from one cockpit to the next, which is often required to synch training environments among multiple pilots, can happen in a fraction of the time it takes over traditional Ethernet connections.

"It’s standard for the 10-year ocean simulations running today to output data sets on the order of 2 terabytes," said Walt Brooks, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division. "Developers hope to improve the performance of this calculation to finish in one day. Moving this volume of data between systems can slow down the development and data analysis process. Faster

LAN networks such as 10 Gb Ethernet are needed to keep pace with the volume of data generated on today’s supercomputing systems."

In media environments, where bandwidth-hungry film and HD video resolution content transfer and delivery are time-sensitive, 10 Gb Ethernet interface capabilities enable facilities to move data quickly and accurately. For instance, in telecine environments, film is scanned and digitized, and then stored as data. An entire feature film at 2K resolution could produce a data set of some eight to 10 terabytes during the editing, finishing and mastering process, so moving data of that magnitude quickly and efficiently is crucial to meet theatrical release deadlines. Ten Gb connectivity further differentiates the quad-processor Tezro workstation in the media industry .

For users of SGI server, NAS storage and visualization systems, SGI will offer the Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet card from S2io, Inc. The 10 Gb Ethernet adapter for SGI systems can be placed in a standard PCI-X slot for port aggregation, potentially replacing multiple Gb Ethernet ports with a single 10 Gb Ethernet port, and significantly increasing performance and lowering total cost of ownership. The IEEE 802.3ae compliant card leverages existing data center infrastructure, requiring no changes to existing 50 micron cabling, operating systems or network administration tools. The driver for this 10 Gb Ethernet technology has been optimized to balance superior throughput performance with the quality of service in error handling and other demands of mission-critical production deployments.

"Data sets are only growing larger, particularly in the HPC and media environments," said Andrew Fenselau, director of HPC product marketing at SGI. "This new 10 Gb Ethernet offering addresses the escalating need among our customers to move big data between large production systems and from storage environments as efficiently as possible. And by allowing data center customers to share files over NFS or CIFS at 10 Gb Ethernet speed, SGI will help users increase their productivity with quicker remote access to their data over Ethernet. We are extremely pleased to offer the Xframe card as another standard connectivity option for our customers’ HPC, visualization and storage needs."

The 10 Gb Ethernet adapter for SGI systems is available for both 64-bit Linux and IRIX operating systems.

About SGI

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com.