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Chelsio Demos Fastest 10gE Adapters For HPC Apps At Gt'04

Chelsio Communications Inc announced it has broken through the 10 microsecond latency barrier for 10-Gigabit Ethernet and demonstrated its high performance adapters at the Grid Today 2004 (Gt'04) conference this week in Philadelphia.

Chelsio is the first 10G Ethernet adapter vendor delivering a TCP (Transport Control Protocol) offload engine (TOE) in silicon, significantly raising the performance and latency bar for the 10G Ethernet adapter industry. Chelsio is also the first to deliver 10G iSCSI in silicon. The host bus adapter, called the T110, was demonstrated at the Gt'04 booth demo.

"Chelsio is focused on accelerating the convergence of network and storage applications using 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, founder and CEO of Chelsio Communications. "Simple, managed networks of integrated storage and network traffic will be made possible by 10-Gigabit Ethernet, and we are using this high-performance computing conference to show the latest advancements possible in the throughput, latency and scalability of these adapters."

In the demo, Chelsio's solution will be shown transmitting standard 1500-Byte Ethernet frames in a peer-to-peer configuration at 7.9Gb throughput with less than 10 microseconds latency from user space to user space and 50 percent CPU utilization with a 2.2GHz Opteron-based server. The line-rate performance of the adapter stays consistent with equal and stable bandwidth per TCP connection, whether there is one or 10,000 connections.

The best performance other 10GE adapters on the market can claim in transferring standard Ethernet frames is only 3 to 4Gb per second, with higher latency and more than 100 percent CPU utilization. This limitation of 10GE adapters has hindered the deployment of the otherwise ubiquitous Ethernet technology in HPC facilities. Some higher performance claims are sometimes made but these use Jumbo Ethernet (9000 Byte) frames, which still cannot achieve the performance of the Chelsio solution using standard Ethernet frames.

"Our benchmark tests show that Chelsio Communications has delivered the first 10G Ethernet adapter card that simultaneously achieves high throughput, low latency, and more importantly, low CPU utilization -- all while using the ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol suite with standard 1500-byte packets. Keeping CPU utilization low frees the CPU to work on other important computing tasks in parallel," said Wu Feng, team leader of research & development in Advanced Network Technologies (RADIANT) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Using high-speed Ethernet as the interconnect technology is preferred for many reasons, particularly its ubiquity and ease of deployment."

Chelsio's host bus adapter card, the T110, is built with Chelsio's Terminator ASIC, a deeply-pipelined VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture that delivers numerous high-bandwidth and low-latency advantages over RISC-based multi-processor system-on-chip implementations. It is the first chip on the market to include a 10G TOE, which is required for high-speed Ethernet networks. The Terminator ASIC has a capacity of one million sessions, while the T110 card can support up to 64,000 connections.

Performance And Latency Demo at Gt'04

At the Grid Today 2004 conference Chelsio demonstrated 7.9Gb per second at 50 percent CPU utilization with an interconnect latency from user-to-user application space of 9.7 us. Pallas MPI benchmarks will be shown to demonstrate the MPI capabilities of T110 for HPC environments. HP Integrity servers running the Itanium 2 processor and unbranded servers running Opteron processors will be the servers with Chelsio's 10G Ethernet adapter with Long Reach XPAKs and Marvell's CX4 for fiber and copper connectivity respectively. A Fujitsu 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch, which has both fiber and copper modules, is used to connect all these servers.

"High performance computing applications need speed and agility from the Information Technology infrastructure in order to meet the demanding needs of engineers and scientists," stated Brian Cox, worldwide product line manager for Hewlett Packard's Business Critical Servers. "10 Gigabit Ethernet technology greatly accelerates the performance flow of information across the fabric in data centers and the computing Grid which dramatically improves time to solution."

"10-Gigabit Ethernet is an important technology for the evolution of next generation infrastructure and client applications," said Kamal Dalmia, director of product marketing for Marvell's Connectivity Business Unit. "As the leader in physical layer technology, we are providing comprehensive solutions for Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet applications and are happy to be a part of the performance demonstration with Chelsio."