Foundry to Provide Supercomputer Networking Fabric

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 21 -- The US National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Sandia National Laboratories has selected Foundry Networks' BigIron MG8 terabit-capacity 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches to provide the core networking fabric for the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative's Red Storm supercomputer.

The Red Storm acquisition is funded by the ASCI program at NNSA, part of the Department of Energy, and is critical to providing supercomputer platforms for 3-D, full-physics simulations in support of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. Red Storm is a highly balanced, massively parallel processing supercomputer with about 10,000 processors, a peak performance of 40 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) and 10 terabytes of memory. The machine is scheduled to become operational in 2004.

Red Storm will use more than 100 ports of Gigabit Ethernet on its BigIron MG8 backbone to connect the system to resources such as a new "visualization cluster" for 3-D modeling. The Red Storm network will enable Sandia to support its national security missions and advance its research using sophisticated 3-D simulations and modeling.

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