MILPITAS, Calif., September 27, 2005 — Force10 Networks today announced that its TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers is anchoring the high performance network for the iGrid 2005 conference, providing nearly 300 Gigabits per second of bandwidth to illustrate the future of scientific problem solving. With 24 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet links and 24 Gigabit Ethernet links, as well as two 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN links, the Force10 TeraScale E1200 is at the core of an international network fabric that connects at various points of presence (POPs) around the world to enable nearly 50 real-time, bandwidth-intensive applications.

"The real-time applications that are being highlighted at the conference this year demonstrate the great impact that network-centric grid technologies will have on the way we approach and solve scientific quandaries and transform the solutions into commercial products," said Maxine Brown, associate director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-chair of iGrid 2005, a workshop and symposium that bring together the world's leading network engineers, middleware developers and application programmers who are constructing the 21st Century's global cyberinfrastructure. "Having Force10's TeraScale E-Series at the core of our network helps us provide the capacity and performance we need to demonstrate these technological advances."

To support the real-time applications that will be demonstrated at the conference, iGrid built a temporary exchange at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to connect to other POPs worldwide. The Force10 TeraScale E1200 is at the core of this new exchange, providing more than twice the existing bandwidth to accommodate data flows into the conference. Supporting 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit and 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, the TeraScale E1200 guarantees predictable performance and delivers unmatched resiliency to ensure maximum network uptime for the conference’s real-time applications.

Among the applications that will be on show at the conference are the real-time control of remote scientific instruments, high-definition video and digital cinema streaming, visualization and virtual reality and high performance computing. One application will showcase a new instrument developed by neurologists that enables them to control an electron microscope in Japan from San Diego while sampling and progressively magnifying live video output. Additionally, Earth scientists will access multi-gigabyte 3D geoscience scene files from remote storage sites in real time to interactively visualize and analyze changes to the atmosphere in an effort to better forecast natural disasters.

Force10 has a strong and growing presence in the research and education communities. Partnerships with industry innovators such as Internet2 and the Peter Kiewit Institute provide access to a wide range of academic and scientific organizations. Additionally, deployments at leading institutions like CERN, where the TeraScale E-Series anchors Europe’s largest campus network, further entrenches Force10 in these high performance communities.

“Organizations in the research community as well as national labs have been critical to our early success and the development of a robust, high performance product,” said Raju Shah, director of technical marketing at Force10 Networks. “By providing the foundation of the network at conferences such as iGrid, we are able to give something back to this community while further demonstrating how well suited the TeraScale E-Series is for advanced networks.”

The biennial iGrid event is designed to accelerate the use of multi-10 Gigabit Ethernet international networks and advanced scientific research on these hybrid networks. This year, iGrid showcases more than four dozen real-time application demonstrations from 20 countries. The conference runs from Sept. 26-29, 2005, at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) in San Diego.

The Force10 TeraScale E-Series brings industry-leading density and resiliency to some of the world’s largest and most complex research networks, including TeraGrid, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the California Institute of Technology, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Argonne National Laboratory. Supporting 1,260 Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, the TeraScale E-Series provides unmatched scalability for long-term network planning and cost-effective expansion.

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