EtherFabric works with existing standards to improve network performance unlike iWarp and InfiniBand, which are incompatible with current network infrastructure and so can require users to replace hardware and software, according to Dan Karr, Level 5 CEO. The EtherFabric network card and software are less of a drain on host server CPUs and allow servers to communicate with one another faster and at higher speeds. The company also claims that using EtherFabric will enable users to reduce the number of servers they deploy by a maximum of 50%.

"The reactions from people we've shown EtherFabric to is surprise," Karr said. "They're skeptical. But when they see what we can do, it's an easy sell. Over time, we hope to have our chips on the motherboard of every server manufactured." He expects EtherFabric to be used in supercomputers and enterprise data centers as well as servers.

Phil Williams, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) advanced research fellow at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., has been beta-testing EtherFabric. The EPSRC is the U.K. government's funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences.

Part of Williams' research involves studying proteins and how they fold using molecular dynamics software running across Beowulf-style clusters of computer nodes. He has been testing EtherFabric on a cluster of eight dual-processor Sun Microsystems Inc. servers running Novell Inc.'s SUSE Enterprise Linux and has experienced a performance increase of around eight times on some of his code. Williams has been comparing EtherFabric's performance to that of Myrinet from Myricom Inc. in Arcadia, Calif., and rated EtherFabric very favorable in ease of use, price and low network latency.

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