Clinton, MA and Oslo, Norway, Feb 26, 2004 Dolphin Interconnect today announced that the SCI Socket version 1.0 software library is now available to customers for high-performance computing applications interconnected with Dolphin SCI adapters. SCI Socket enables standard Berkley sockets to use the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) as a transport medium with its high bandwidth and extremely low latency.

"This is the lowest latency socket solution available today," said Hugo Kohmann, CTO for Dolphin Interconnect. "SCI Socket opens new high-performance possibilities for a broad range of networking applications."

Dolphin has benchmarked a completed one byte socket send/socket receive latency at 2.27 microseconds, which corresponds to more than 203,800 roundtrip transactions per second. Benchmarks using Netperf also show more than 255 MBytes (2,035 Megabits/s) sustained throughput using standard TCP STREAM sockets. The SCI Socket software uses Dolphin's SISCI API as its transport and most of the communication takes place in user space, avoiding time-consuming system calls and networking protocols. SCI remote memory access provides a fast and reliable connection.

"These record-setting performance benchmarks underscore the capabilities of the SCI standard as a high-performance interconnect," said Kare Lochsen, CEO of Dolphin Interconnect. "Dolphin has extensive expertise in this technology having developed the first SCI-based interconnect soon after it became a IEEE standard in 1992, and we remain committed to keeping SCI at the most competitive performance levels in the future."

SCI Socket requires no operating system patches or application modifications to run the software. SCI Socket is open source software available under LGPL/GPL and supports all popular Linux distributions for x86 and x86/Opteron. In Dolphin testing, the lowest latency was achieved using AMD Opteron (X86_64) processors. Support for UDP and Microsoft Windows is planned.

Dolphin SCI adapters are used to build server clusters for high-performance computing and in a wide range of embedded real-time computing applications including reflective memory, simulation and visualization systems, and systems requiring high-availability and fast failover.

For a limited time, an evaluation kit consisting of two PCI-SCI adapter cards and cables is available directly from Dolphin Interconnect at a substantial discount. When installed in a user's application platform, the evaluation kit enables effective testing of the SCI Socket software. The software and documentation is included at no charge. Please visit the Dolphin web site for more information at www.dolphinics.com/eval.