News and Events

2003

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SELECTS FORCE10 NETWORKS FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE CAMPUS COMPUTING GRID

Line-Rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet Connects Scientific Visualization, Computing and Storage Resources Across Campus-Wide Grid

MILPITAS, Calif., March 10, 2003 — Force10 Networks, Inc. today announced that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) has selected the E-Series switch/router to provide a next-generation, inter-campus grid computing infrastructure. The E-Series will initially aggregate Gigabit Ethernet connections from high performance computing (HPC) resources located at TACC’s facility at UT’s J. J. Pickle Research Campus and other TACC and UT advanced computing resources located in the state-of-the-art Applied Computational Engineering & Sciences (ACES) building on the UT main academic campus. The E-Series switch/routers will be connected over a 10-Gigabit Ethernet enhancement to the Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network (GAATN). Over the next year, individual resources in both locations with get dedicated 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to the E-Series devices, and new buildings on both campuses are likely to install E-Series switches to join this emerging UT Grid.

“Our goal is to accelerate the collaborative nature of science on grids,” said Dr. Jay Boisseau, TACC director. “We selected the Force10 E-Series for our multi-campus UT Grid network infrastructure because it delivers the performance we need today as well as the density and scalability to support the growth of our grid in the future.”

The University of Texas at Austin is the largest university in the United States, and TACC is building a university-wide grid that will connect a diverse set of geographically distributed workstations, computational research clusters, and storage devices to TACC’s HPC and visualization facilities. The initial deployment will integrate TACC systems with computational resources in the Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES), a new interdisciplinary institute at UT Austin. ICES is establishing new research programs in distributed and grid computing, computational biology, and computational materials and will include existing UT research programs in computational fluid dynamics, subsurface modeling, and other disciplines.

“The UT Grid offers a glimpse of how computing is changing,” said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing at Force10. “Line-rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet is the enabling technology for computing grids, and we are very excited to be helping TACC at the University of Texas accelerate their research in next-generation grid computing systems and applications.”

About the Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is a computational resource center at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). TACC provides advanced computing resources and services to enable computationally-intensive research by researchers at UT Austin and nationwide through its membership in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). TACC’s staff also conducts research and development activities to enhance the capabilities of these advanced computing resources. For more information, visit www.tacc.utexas.edu.

Contact:
Peter Ruzicka
Force10 Networks Inc.
408-965-5151
pruzicka@force10networks.com

Contact:
Jennifer Arculeo
Force10 Networks Inc.
408-965-5194
jarculeo@force10networks.com

About Force10 Networks
Force10 Networks is the pioneer in building and securing high performance networks. Based on a revolutionary system architecture that delivers best-in-class resiliency and massive scalability, Force10’s TeraScale E-Series switch/routers ensure predictable application performance, increase network availability, and reduce operating costs. Today, many of the world’s largest Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks depend on Force10 Networks. For additional information, please visit www.force10networks.com.

Force10 Networks and E-Series are registered trademarks, and P-Series, S-Series, TeraScale and FTOS are trademarks of Force10 Networks, Inc. All other company names are trademarks of their respective holders.