SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY - News) today announced that three of the U.S.'s most respected scientific research organizations and one of Japan's top universities have chosen Foundry to provide 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking technology for supercomputing demonstrations and tests they will carry out at the 2003 Supercomputing Conference (SC2003) which opens this week in Phoenix, AZ. SC2003 is an international conference on high-performance computing and networking and will feature the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as the University of Tokyo, will use a variety of Foundry's high-performance, high-density Gigabit and 10GbE switches including the new BigIron MG8® switch to operate their test networks at the conference. Foundry also will provide network infrastructure for SCinet, SC2003's state-of-art, on-site network designed and built especially for the annual conference. Foundry expects that during the show its systems will handle multiple terabytes of traffic per second during peak demand, roughly equivalent to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous streaming DVD sessions.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, managed by the University of California for the Department of Energy's NNSA, selected Foundry's high-density, non-blocking 10GbE BigIron MG8 switch and the BigIron 15000 switch to run technology demonstrations within NNSA's booth (#3023). Lawrence Livermore will use Foundry switches to participate in the Lustre File System demonstration, which aims to show very high data rate performance for local clustered file systems integrated with remote sites in the same name space. The demonstration will feature a very high capacity clustered storage environment, providing 80Gbps local file system access and 10Gbps remote file system access across a 2000-mile wide area link. The test participants expect aggregate performance to disk to be in excess of tens of Gigabits per second. All transmission of data between locations and within the clusters will be across multiple 10Gbps links using standard TCP/IP.

Sandia National Laboratories chose the NetIron® 800 high-end network router from Foundry for Supercomputing 2003. "The Foundry equipment, which provides a 10GbE link to a number of BigIron MG8 switches installed at our New Mexico facility, will support some of our advanced simulations and interactive demonstrations. Foundry's BigIron MG8 was also selected to provide a high performance solution to support Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm networking backbone. It is important to have this solid support for our deployments and demonstrations," indicated Mike Vahle, Program Director for Advanced Simulation and Computing at Sandia National Laboratories.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will use the BigIron 15000 switches in tests designed to prove the versatility of 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking technology and to demonstrate multi-gigabit end-to-end TCP/IP throughput. The Los Alamos demonstration will show that 10GbE is a viable and cost-effective solution for high-capacity network-attached servers. The demonstration can be seen at Los Alamos' booth ( #221).

"We are using the Foundry switches for SC2003 because our tests with the Foundry FastIron® 1500 switch over the past year produced extraordinarily low latencies for 10 Gigabit Ethernet while maintaining reliable high throughput. Furthermore, we achieved these results right out of the box with virtually no tuning," said Wu-chun Feng, Team Leader RADIANT: Research And Development In Advanced Network Technology for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

For its high bandwidth test, the University of Tokyo (booth #1519) will connect 32 servers to Foundry's BigIron 8000 switch using Gigabit Ethernet connections and will deploy three 10GbE connections between Phoenix and Japan. This network will demonstrate how iSCSI can enable very high bandwidth storage applications across a wide area TCP/IP network.

"These demonstrations by our customers and partners show that switched Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet are truly ready to be the interconnect fabric for a wide array of high-performance applications," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager of Foundry's Enterprise Business Unit. "Today we have demonstrable proof that Ethernet is poised to become the interconnect of choice for the most demanding computing environments, and that Foundry's Ethernet switches are a leading solution of choice for high performance computing."

Foundry Powers SCinet and the Bandwidth Challenge

Foundry's BigIron 15000 switch equipped with 10GbE and Gigabit-over-Copper connections was chosen to provide critical network switching capability for SCinet, SC2003's high-performance, production-quality network that exhibitors and attendees depend on for reliable local area, wide area, and commodity network service. SCinet enables a rich environment for real-time demonstrations, communications, and collaboration, provides access to major national networks and testbeds from the floor of SC2003, and a virtual conference capability with international participants.

At SC2003, science and engineering research communities across the globe will use the unique SCinet infrastructure for the annual Bandwidth Challenge, which challenges participants to demonstrate emerging techniques or applications that consume enormous amounts of network resources. Numerous new technologies including 10GbE have made their debut performances during the Bandwidth Challenge. For SC2003, applicants are challenged to set new performance benchmarks across the multiple research networks that connect to SCinet.

Finally, at SC2003 Foundry will demonstrate its range of high-performance network switching and routing solutions within its own booth ( #1611). New products targeted at the cluster and supercomputing marketplace to be demonstrated for the first time at SC2003 include Foundry's newly-announced 48-port stackable switch, the EdgeIron(TM) 48G, and the new 40-port Gigabit Ethernet modules for Foundry's BigIron MG8 platform. This 40-port module is the industry's highest-density, non-blocking Gigabit Ethernet solution for a chassis-based switch. Foundry partners Spirent and Doublewide Software will demonstrate their high-performance testing and development solutions within Foundry's booth.

Foundry Networks Inc.