New IPv6 speed records set

Who says speeds and feeds are passé? Who says network interface cards are a commodity? If you look at the latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet activity, the speed of NICs is very much at the forefront of industry competition.

Last time, I detailed how Tehuti Networks was making a point of demonstrating its 10 Gigabit cards at a couple of different trade shows.

Now Chelsio Communications is letting the world know that its NIC was a part of the equipment used by an international team that set two consecutive IPv6 Land Speed Records for Internet2 in the single-stream and multi-stream categories.

Chelsio's 10Gb Unified Wire Accelerators - the so-called T3, not to be confused with, you know, a T-3 leased line - were used in the competition by a team led by the University of Tokyo. Chelsio has been working with that team for the last two-and-a-half years.

Other members of the team included the WIDE Project, NTT Communications, JGN2, SURFnet, CANARIE, and Pacific Northwest Gigapop. According to the group, they created a network path over 30,000 kilometers long, crossing six international networks - over three-quarters of the circumference of the Earth.

They achieved an application throughput of 9.08Gbps, and even surpassed the current IPv4 records.

Kei Hiraki, professor at the University of Tokyo and team leader, is quoted as saying, “Chelsio’s 10Gb network accelerators are fast, flexible adapters that enable us to finely tune the output rate of the end-systems to adapt to the characteristics of the network path. These records are final for the 10Gbps era because they represent more than 99% of the upper limit of network capacity.”

Chelsio is aiming the cards at cluster-computing applications and long-distance communications, both for IPv4 and IPv6.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.