Force10 big at supercomputing show

Force10 Networks this week is taking a high profile at the SC2002 supercomputing show in Baltimore.

The company, which I have mentioned before in this newsletter, is a start-up focusing on 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Force10 introduced its first switches for the high-speed LAN technology in September.

Now, the company says its products will be used by most of the participants in the Bandwidth Challenge at SC2002, a contest to see which team can really tax the conference network by solving a tough problem. The five teams using Force10 equipment are Argonne National Laboratory, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Force10 is also demonstrating two of its high-end switches as they each handle the traffic of 128 server nodes, as simulated by Ixia testing systems.

There is a connection between the two switches at a whopping 160G bit/sec - a speed achieved by grouping together 16 lines of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The traffic is sent along the 16 lines using a technology called Equal Cost MultiPath routing, a simple network-level load-balancing mechanism supported by Open Shortest Path First.

Switches of this scale currently have limited applications, because very few organizations have the need for such capacity. But it is interesting to see what can be accomplished, and what someday may make its way into the mainstream.

The force of 10 gigabits
Network World High Speed LANs Newsletter, 09/04/02

In addition to writing this newsletter, Jeff Caruso edits Network World's e-mail newsletters from his office on New York's Long Island. If you would like to make suggestions about newsletter format or content, or even just express your opinion on today's topic, you can reach Jeff at jcaruso@nww.com.

High Speed LANs archive
Past newsletters.