PROCESSORS

Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, today announced several additions to its industry-leading Server Switch product line, including the Topspin 120 Server Switch and Topspin EX Ethernet Gateway. Both products are key components of Topspin's enterprise-class, high performance computing (HPC) solutions. These solutions are aimed at delivering the economic and performance benefits of InfiniBand-based HPC clusters to mainstream enterprises by ensuring the enhanced high availability, manageability, and I/O capabilities mission critical enterprise applications require. "With the additions of the Topspin 120 Server Switch and Topspin EX Ethernet Gateway, we are extending the opportunity to leverage InfiniBand for high performance computing beyond the lab and university markets, and into the mainstream enterprise," said Stu Aaron, vice president of marketing at Topspin. "These products are cost-effective and designed to provide seamless connectivity among HPC server clusters and between those clusters and their LANs, SANs, and/or NAS environments." The Topspin 120 is a 1U, stackable, 24-port InfiniBand switching solution with built-in redundancy and Topspin's industry-leading robust management capabilities. It is designed as a cost effective, reliable building block for enterprise HPC applications in vertical markets such as Financial, Entertainment, BioIT, Oil and Gas, and Engineering. Leveraging the new InfiniScale III InfiniBand switching silicon from Mellanox, the Topspin 120 provides 480Gbps of aggregate bandwidth and is capable of supporting both 4X (10Gbps) and 12X (30Gbps) InfiniBand connections to servers. Multiple Topspin 120's can be cascaded together to build HPC clusters of tens to hundreds of nodes. Additionally, when combined with either the Topspin 90 or Topspin 360 Server Switch and their Ethernet and/or Fibre Channel gateways, customers can provide seamless connectivity between the high performance server cluster and its network and storage resources. The Topspin EX Ethernet Gateway provides high performance InfiniBand to Ethernet routing capabilities for connecting an InfiniBand attached server cluster with its Ethernet attached LANs or Network Attached Storage. It is Topspin's second generation Ethernet Gateway design and the first Topspin gateway based on Topspin's own ASIC technology. The Topspin EX is a 10gigabit Ethernet-capable design that provides six auto-sensing gigabit Ethernet ports and almost 11 million packets per second of throughput. At this performance level it significantly out-performs any other InfiniBand-to-Ethernet product on the market. With load balancing and aggregation capabilities, a single Topspin EX gateway can support a cluster of tens or hundreds of nodes providing significant I/O consolidation benefits to customers. "Technologies get their start in labs and universities, but ultimately the mainstream enterprise is the larger market opportunity," said Vernon Turner, Group Vice President at IDC. "With these solutions, Topspin is putting together a portfolio that can transcend from Budget Class, to Enterprise Class." Availability Topspin 120 Server Switch will be available for trials in December 2003 and will be sold directly by Topspin, its channel partners and several system vendor OEMs. The Topspin EX Ethernet Gateway is available for trials now. It can be deployed in either the Topspin 360 or Topspin 90 Server Switch platforms.