Force10 Networks today announced that the TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers provides the high performance foundation for 29 of the world's largest supercomputers, according to the most recent list from Top500.org. By combining leading Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities with unmatched resiliency, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers the scalable and predictable performance that supercomputers demand.

"As supercomputers continue to increase in size and power, it is more essential than ever that reliability and scalability are built into the foundation," said Sachi Sambandan, vice president of engineering at Force10 Networks. "With the industry's highest density and resiliency, the TeraScale E-Series is a natural fit for high performance supercomputing environments that are pushing the limits of what computers can accomplish."

The dual rise of small, powerful servers and high density Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet is transforming the supercomputer landscape by enabling cost-effective cluster computing. On the most recent list, clustering is the dominant design with 72 percent of the world's largest supercomputers leveraging this architecture gain the benefits of supercomputing power at a fraction of the traditional cost.

With its high Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities and unmatched resiliency, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series enables organizations to interconnect thousands of computing nodes while ensuring reliable performance. Seven of the top 50 supercomputers, including IBM's top two cluster supercomputers, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (11) and Indiana University (23), depend on the TeraScale E-Series. Additionally, of the top 10 supercomputers that are powered by Dell, seven are anchored by the TeraScale E-Series, including Sandia National Laboratories (6), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (37), the University of Buffalo Center for Computational Research (57), the Texas Advanced Computing Center (65) and Brigham Young University (87).

As clustering dominates as the architecture of choice for the world's largest supercomputers, Ethernet now dominates as the interconnect fabric that links thousands of processing engines. According to Top500.org, more than 51 percent of supercomputers depend on Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet far surpassing either Myrinet or Infiniband as the leading fabric interconnect technology for the world's high performance supercomputers.

Recently, Force10 introduced the S2410 data center switch to further the trend of adopting Ethernet as an interconnect technology in high performance supercomputers. The Force10 S2410 delivers low switching latency on par with Infiniband and proprietary interconnect technologies, enabling data center managers to simplify their networks on a single technology.