Essential, an ODS Networks Company, Announces Shipment of 10th GSN Networking Switch

 Albaquerque 12 Aug 99 ODS Networks shipped its 10th GSN high performance networking switch. The ESN-10000, based on the GSN (Gigabit System Network) is the world's fastest and most powerful networking switch, the company claims. Research and development efforts for the ESN-10000 were performed through a strategic alliance with Raytheon/E-Systems. This switch will be a key component of the world?s largest data compute cluster being built in support of the U.S. Government?s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Essential/ODS is implementing this GSN-based solution in cooperation with SGI.

The ESN-10000 was developed by Essential, an ODS Networks company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Each port on the Essential/ODS 32-port GSN switch is able to transfer 6400 megabits of data bi-directionally for an aggregate switch bandwidth of 512 gigabits per second. This data rate offers a substantial performance leap over other available high-speed networking technologies, including Gigabit Ethernet, ATM and Fibre Channel. As an example, depending on system configuration, an extremely large graphics file that might take from 2-3 minutes to transfer on a Gigabit Ethernet system can be transferred using GSN technology in only 20-30 seconds. GSN also allows for multiple conversations to take place simultaneously. By contrast, technologies like FDDI and Fibre Channel allow only one conversation to take place. The number of GSN conversations that can occur are proportional to the number of ports available.

?As high-performance server environments become increasingly complex, high-speed switching capability is the critical link,? said Debra Goldfarb, vice president, worldwide systems and servers, International Data Corporation (IDC). ?We view the technologies which ODS is bringing to market to be intrinsic to the evolution and usability of highly scalable systems and their associated environments.?

> With this milestone established, Essential/ODS has also announced an expanded plan for the evolution of its GSN product line. In support of the newest high performance computers being developed by industry leading manufacturers such as HP, Sun, SGI, IBM, Compaq, and others; Essential/ODS has announced the development of a GSN Network Interface Card (NIC) for the (4x)PCI bus. This host bus adapter (HBA) will include many leading-edge enhancements such as GSN?s Operating System bypass technology, Schedule Transfer (ST), and connectivity to the next generation PCI bus architecture. Plans include driver development for LINUX, WINDOWS NT, Irix, Solaris, Tru 64, AIX andThe GSN throughput outperforms all other standardized networking technologies with at least six times the bandwidth. Fibre Channel supports 1.06 gigabits today but won?t approach GSN?s 1 gigabyte per second for many years. Gigabit Ethernet is similarly bandwidth-limited. GSN will first be adopted in supercomputer centers and other very data-intensive environments where the number of processors operating in parallel (at higher and higher speeds) continues to grow. The quantities of data being manipulated are staggering, and the existing network connections are straining under the load. Additionally, GSN is the only infrastructure technology available today that can move uncompressed HDTV files in real time. HP-UX.

 

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