The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois has selected Force10 Networks' E-Series E1200 high-density Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch/routers. The equipment is being used in Phase II of NCSA's portion of the TeraGrid project. Force10's E-Series switch/routers have already been deployed in Phase I of the project at NCSA, as well as at the three other original TeraGrid sites: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Financial terms were not disclosed.
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- Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), TeraGrid is a multi-institutional effort to build and deploy the world's most comprehensive computing infrastructure for open scientific research. IBM is providing integration services for the project. The NSF TeraGrid project will initially use a dedicated 40 Gbps wide area "backplane" to connect computers, storage facilities, visualization systems and applications at Argonne and other TeraGrid sites. Clusters connecting to the grid use 10-Gigabit Ethernet interconnections between Gigabit Ethernet-attached Linux servers.
- Force10 Networks' 10 Gbps Ethernet switch/router supports up to 336 ports of Gigabit Ethernet or 28 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) per chassis. Six custom ASICs deliver non-blocking, line-rate forwarding across all ports, even with access control lists (ACLs) or QoS applied. Force10's software delivers full functionality L2 switching and L3 routing. The company initially is offering two models: the full-size E1200 featuring 14 line-card slots, 1.2 Tbps non-blocking switch fabric, 40 Gbps bandwidth per line-card slot, redundant route processor modules (RPMs), redundant switch fabric modules (SFMs), redundant power and hot-swap of all key components; and the half-sized E600, which uses the same cards.
