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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Networking:
Ammasso Unveils RDMA-Enabled Ethernet Server Adapter
Ammasso Inc, a developer of Ethernet-based server-to-server networking
technology, announced the release of the Ammasso 1100, a high performance, low
latency, RDMA-enabled Ethernet Adapter. By exploiting existing infrastructure,
new RDMA standards and advanced technology, Ammasso enables enterprise
applications, clustered databases, high performance computing and storage
infrastructure to perform as never before.
The Ammasso 1100 is designed to work within existing Ethernet infrastructures,
using existing switches, cables, and trained personnel. It increases
performance of application to application data transfers by five to 10 times
by lowering message latency, offloading the host CPU, and leveraging RDMA.
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a set of technologies that enable the
movement of data from the memory of one server directly into the memory of
another without involving either operating system, thus reducing CPU usage and
increasing performance.
"End user research indicates that over half of all technical clusters are
configured with Ethernet," said Chris Willard, research vice president of
Workstations and High Performance Computing Systems at IDC. "However, for
Ethernet to maintain its position in the marketplace, particularly in
technical computing where ever increasing applications volume and requirements
for parallel performance generate requirements for ever more capable
communications technology, it must keep pace with competing technologies while
maintaining competitive pricing. Performance improvements, such as those
provided by Ammasso's technology, are particularly important in areas like
clustering, where the speed of communications between nodes is a major factor
in determining appropriate applications, overall performance, and the upper
limits of system scalability."
In response to these challenges, RDMA protocol standards (like iWARP) are
being defined by organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
and the RDMA Consortium. These protocols enable the use of RDMA across network
infrastructures.
"We have made a significant investment in developing high performance storage
technology that exploits the advantages of iWARP," said David Ford, director
of engineering from Network Appliance Inc. "RDMA over Ethernet enables the
broad adoption of high performance IP-based I/O for storage and clustering in
the data center."
Application programming interface standards are enabling a range of
applications to simply leverage the benefits of this technology. In the
scientific application arena, MPI (Message Passing Interface) has been a de-
facto standard for a number of years, while in the enterprise space, DAPL
(Direct Access Provider Library), a newer standard, is gaining strong support.
The Ammasso 1100 provides native support for both MPI and DAPL applications
assuring maximum performance.
"We see this as a huge step enabling customers to leverage their Ethernet
experience and infrastructure in new areas," said Ken Cheng, vice president of
marketing for Foundry Networks. "As a leading provider of high-performance
enterprise and service provider switching, routing and Web traffic management
solutions, we have found that customers using high performance clusters need a
combination of wire-speed 1GigE and 10GigE switches as well as technology
within their servers to maximize their application performance. We are pleased
to see Ammasso delivering this type of product into the marketplace."
"We believe that the Ammasso 1100 will, once again, show how Ethernet responds
to the needs of users by bring proven technologies into the Ethernet
standard," said Larry Genovesi, CEO of Ammasso. "In addition to being fully
standard compatible, our adapter includes patent pending technology within the
areas of Connection Management and Direct Data Placement. We feel this gives
us unique advantages in terms of performance and capacity. As network traffic
is driven by more applications talking to applications, the need for efficient
server-to-server networking is becoming critical, and the Ammasso 1100
fulfills that need today."
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