* Chelsio Communications’ 10 Gigabit Ethernet card
Start-up Chelsio Communications is touting a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter that the company claims is the world’s fastest, with less than 10 microseconds of latency.
The adapter card has at least two things going for it to increase its speed – a TCP offload engine in silicon and iSCSI support, also in silicon. Chelsio claims it is the first vendor to offer either technology in an adapter. The adapter, the T110, was demonstrated at the recent Grid Today 2004 conference in Philadelphia.
Chelsio says it can reach 7.9G bit/sec throughput, where other 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters might only reach about 4G bit/sec, unless they use jumbo frames.
The TCP offload feature also helps to keep CPU utilization down on the server hosting the adapter. In Chelsio’s recent demo, utilization was shown at 50% with a 2.2-GHz Opteron-based server while transferring 1,500-byte frames (still within the standard frame size, vs. jumbo) in a peer-to-peer configuration.
With TCP offload, the server CPU is freed up to perform other tasks, rather than spending cycles managing the network connections. At high transmission speeds, this capability becomes critical, as the volume of transactions requires a lot of responses in a short amount of time. Without any offload, you run the risk of overwhelming the server CPU with network requests.
Chelsio’s card contains its own Terminator ASIC, which includes a TCP offload engine. The ASIC has the capacity to handle 1 million sessions.
Samples of the adapter are available now for $4,900.
