Foundry HPC Solution Provides An Unprecedented Combination of Wire-Speed Networking and Industry-Leading Scale for Efficiency and Value
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and DARMSTADT, Germany, Dec. 10, 2008 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Foundry Networks(r), Inc. (Nasdaq:FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced the German-based Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI) selected its high-performance computing (HPC) networking solution for its a uncompromised performance, efficiency and value. Foundry's 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switching solution for the GSI's particle accelerator network and facility allows wire-speed handling of the enormous volume of data resulting from experiments with the GSI's own revolutionary particle accelerator and with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.
Established in 1969, the goal of the scientific research conducted at the GSI is to understand the structure and behavior of the world that surrounds us. The GSI operates a world-leading accelerator facility for heavy-ion beams, used for fundamental research. At the GSI, over 300 scientific researchers and engineers and more than 1000 guest researchers per year, from around the world, conduct research into areas ranging from nuclear and atomic physics to plasma and materials research as well as biophysics and cancer therapy. By leveraging Foundry's performance-focused switches, the GSI is able to efficiently transport and process data from the collisions of subatomic particles on about 2,500 processing cores with computing power of 20 teraflops. The input and results data are stored on about 70 servers with a capacity of 700 terabytes.
The GSI decided on Foundry's high-performance networking solution to ensure congestion-free communication for its large group of computing and data nodes. Foundry's BigIron(r) RX-32 Layer 2/3 backbone switch was capable of fulfilling these extreme switching capacity demands through industry-leading port density. The switch delivers maximum flexibility and throughput, with up to 1,536 ports of GbE or 128-ports of 10GbE in a single chassis at wire-speed. The research institute is also extending its existing HPC network with Foundry's FastIron(r) Edge X and FastIron SuperX(tm)/SX Layer 2/3 switches while expanding several links to 10 gigabit Ethernet.
With the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the GSI is leading the scientific program concerning heavy ion experiment known as 'A Large Ion Collider Experiment' (ALICE). To cope with the large quantities of data produced by this program, the GSI participated in the construction of World Wide Grid, an evolution of the World Wide Web. The GSI's data center is an established part of the Grid for analyzing data from ALICE.
