MOVIES

Milpitas, CA – Force10 Networks, Inc. announced that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin 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 HPC computing resources located at TACC, and connects at 10-Gigabit Ethernet speeds across the Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network (GAATN) to TACC and UT HPC resources located on the main UT campus. “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 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 UT Grid that will connect a diverse set of geographically distributed workstations, computational research clusters, and storage devices to TACC’s high performance computing 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 distributing and grid computing, computational biology, and computational materials and will include existing research UT 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.”