ACADEMIA

Chelsio Communications has announced that its T4 based 10GbE adapters have been selected by NEC Corporation for NEC's HPC Systems for network and storage connectivity in SX-ACE, the latest SX-series Vector Supercomputer, targeted at large data processing applications. Equipped with the Chelsio T420-CR Storage Adapter, the NEC SX-ACE enables customers to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency for scientific computing applications such as weather forecasting, climate studies, fluid dynamics and material science simulations.  

Chelsio's T4 and T5 based 10GbE adapters, among the highest performing in the industry, are designed for converged storage, server and cluster networking solutions. The Terminator Unified Wire Engine combines high performance protocol offload with advanced security, reliability, traffic management and QoS capabilities.

"Chelsio's high performance T4 engine is an ideal 10GbE solution for our new SX-ACE Vector Supercomputer platform," said Shigeyuki Aino, Chief Manager of 3rd Server Department. IT Platform Division,  NEC Corporation. "By leveraging Chelsio's T420-CR 10GbE network interface card and related technologies within the SX-ACE, NEC HPC's solutions are shattering performance and efficiency barriers for shared file systems, and high performance computing applications."

"We are particularly happy to provide high speed connectivity for NEC's SX-ACE Vector Supercomputer, given that our Terminator architecture's pedigree traces back to such environments. T4 has specifically been designed for high throughput and low latency clustering, in conjunction with efficient storage networking," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio.  "T4 based products provide a converged fabric solution for our customers, using industry standard protocols such as iSCSI, iWARP, TCP/IP and UDP/IP over the familiar Ethernet technology.  API compatibility with our T5 and follow on ASICs further assures our customers a smooth and pain free transition to 40Gb and beyond."

NEC HPC's SX-ACE combines NEC HPC's system software with symmetric multi-processing and the latest networking and storage hardware innovations – including 10GbE connectivity, a 64b multi-core vector processor and 64GB of memory per node – to deliver unprecedented performance and efficiency levels. With 256 GFlops per node, one tenth the power consumption and one fifth the floor space of previous generations, the NEC HPC SX-ACE Vector Supercomputer dramatically raises the bar for computational and space efficiencies.

Chelsio's Terminator 4 is a hyper-virtualized protocol offload engine, a proprietary fourth generation ASIC that supports a complete suite of storage and networking protocols, with unique security, traffic management and QoS capabilities.   T4 based adapters transform standard Ethernet into a robust, reliable, high-speed Unified Wire fabric that enables simultaneous support for storage and compute network applications that traditionally required different fabrics such as FibreChannel or InfiniBand.