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Colorado Springs, Colo. - Myricom Inc., developer of the
widely used Myrinet in high-performance computing applications, will
introduce "bilingual" 10-Gigabit network interface cards and
system-level switches this week that use both Ethernet and Myrinet
protocols.
But moving in behind Myricom is a newcomer that will take on iWarp,
Infiniband and TCP offload engine concepts for accelerating Ethernet.
Level 5 Networks Inc. claims that by duplicating TCP stacks in the user
space, it can offer channel performance comparable to Myrinet or
Infiniband while preserving all native Ethernet protocols.
Myricom will introduce its new generation at the 2005 International
Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany, this week, because of
the network's traditional base in high-performance computing. Level 5,
by contrast, is aiming at the data center, with grid and supercomputing
as secondary markets. In both realms, first-generation high-speed
networks and fabrics initially were seen as threatened by PCI Express
Advanced Switching and Serial RapidIO. With several new concepts for
accelerating Ethernet performance, however, Ethernet's future as a
backplane and fabric looks more promising.
While many in the serial-interconnect community worry about the
ubiquity of Ethernet Layer 2 framing, Myricom founder and president
Chuck Seitz said it's not so much the protocol as the price points of
1-Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet that spurred Myricom to make a
response.
Myrinet has become well-established in such supercomputing environments
as national energy labs, automotive development and oil exploration.
While Infiniband temporarily threatened to take market share in the
grid-computing cluster world, its limited acceptance kept Myrinet alive
and well. Indeed, many companies in the Infiniband community have
turned to iWarp and remote direct memory access (RDMA) as
Ethernet-based alternatives to Infiniband.
Myrinet has moved from being proprietary to being a full ANSI standard,
implemented on such operating systems as Linux, Mac OS X, Windows,
Solaris and Free-BSD, offering Ethernet emulation through TCP/IP. The
Myrinet network interface cards (NICs) were designed from the beginning
as firmware-powered offload engines. Moving to an Ethernet interface
does not take away such advantages of the Myrinet environment as
multipath routing and OS bypass.
The Myri-10G switches, expandable from 16 to 128 ports, will be priced
as low as $400 per port, depending on configuration. The PCI Express
NICs, populated with 10GBase-CX4 interfaces, will list at $795. The
cards offer offloads for Internet Protocol checksum operations and full
OS bypass. The Myri-10G NICs carry the advantage of being able to be
used with any 10-Gigabit physical-layer device. The NICs and switches
scale in the same way as Myrinet 2000 and offer full routing at Layer 2.
Level 5's method of improving stack performance is dubbed EtherFabric
and is significantly different than the iWarp and RDMA development
efforts that grew out of Infiniband, said Dan Karr, chief executive of
the U.S. Level 5 operation in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The EtherFabric NIC is fully compatible with both TCP/IP and Sockets,
requiring no porting or recompiling of applications. The current
1-Gigabit Ethernet card, offered in both PCI and PCI-X versions, will
be followed by 10-Gigabit versions. In the meantime, Level 5 will offer
a dual-port 1-Gigabit/port host bus adapter card for $495, in general
availability this month.
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