SCIENCE & ENGINEERING NEWS
Tokyo, JAPAN — GENROCO, Inc. announced that the Company demonstrated its new 800 megabyte per second Gigabyte System Network (GSN) interface card at a supercomputer industry gathering held in Japan last week. Representatives from Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Compaq, SGI, and other platform vendors attended the seminar, which was hosted by Tokyo Electron LTD (TEL) and held at TEL’s headquarters.
The GENROCO TURBOfibreR GSN-6466 GSN controller provides an interface from 64 bit 66 megahertz PCI based computer systems to a GSN fabric running TCP/IP and Scheduled Transfer (ST). The demonstration exhibited IP networking between a SUN Microsystems E250 server and an SGI Origin 2000 machine over GSN. This was the first public showing of GSN traffic between different manufacturers’ computers. GENROCO is currently taking orders for the new cards as well as GSN routers and switches, which have driver support for SUN Solaris, Compaq Tru-64, and IBM AIX UNIX platforms. Shipments will begin this quarter to sites in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
“The GENROCO GSN products will enable our customers to rapidly ramp up their networking capacity through TCP/IP networks,” stated Carl A. Pick, Chairman and CEO of GENROCO. “The Japanese and world high performance computing community has been looking for this kind of bandwidth power and now it is a reality for well-known server platforms.” GENROCO will participate a similar industry event at CERN, the European Center for High Energy Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 15, 2000.
GSN, is the highest bandwidth and lowest latency open system industry standard, providing full duplex 6400 megabit (800 megabyte) per second channels of error-free, flow controlled data. The technology is ideal wherever organizations require timely movement of large amounts of information including scientific and technical computing, digital TV and movie production, data mining, transaction processing, video and film archiving, and storage management. The ANSI standard provides for interoperability with disparate technologies including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, ATM, HIPPI-800, and other standards. A GSN fabric is an ideal backbone for multiplexing Fibre Channel storage data streams. GSN Networks are currently in use at several US government data centers.
ST is a new ANSI standard network protocol designed to allow many times higher bandwidth with much lower host platform overhead than TCP/IP or any other current industry standard. An ST datagram over any type of network commences, or is “scheduled”, only when a ready transmit buffer is matched by an equal sized, ready receive buffer at the destination. This allows the sending and receiving engines at endpoints of a network to operate at the highest possible speed and efficiency by eliminating buffer overruns and underruns. ST can be used to encapsulate SCSI and other protocols. Further information about GSN and ST can be found at http://www.hnf.org/ .
GENROCO, Inc. is a 25-year-old, publicly traded engineering and marketing company that specializes in developing I/O solutions for users of high performance storage area networks (SANs). By providing cross-platform support for its patented technology, the Company is able to offer unique, extraordinarily high bandwidth, low host overhead products for these markets. GENROCO enjoys a global customer base that includes Compaq, Fujitsu, SGI, Sun, the US Departments of Defense and Energy, CERN, and other research institutions. Additional information about GENROCO can be found at http://www.genroco.com .
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