Extreme Networks Powers University of Illinois Chicago's Winning Entry at SC06

For Second Consecutive Year, Extreme Networks' BlackDiamond Switch Plays Key Role Providing 10 Gigabit Data Transfer for Winner of the Bandwidth Challenge: Providing high-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology that powers the world's most critical scientific research, Extreme Networks award-winning BlackDiamond Ethernet switch again provided robust Ethernet network connectivity to assist the winning entry for the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge. Extreme Networks enabled the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), to win at Supercomputing '06. NCDM's Teraflow Network, a high performance and standards-based High Performance Cluster Computing (HPCC) infrastructure, won by sustaining a data transfer rate of 8Gb/s over a 10Gb/s link, with a peak rate of 9.18Gb/s during the competition. "Extreme Networks' BlackDiamond 8800 switch provided excellent scalability throughout the event and consistently achieved multiple Gigabit data transfers across our network links," said Yunhong Gu, Ph.D., Research Scientist for UIC. "We are excited to have built and performed the winning entry for this prestigious event." Extreme Networks contributed with its award winning BlackDiamond 8800 switch to support NCDM's use of its own open source software products, UDT and SECTOR, to transfer large datasets efficiently at high speeds on optical networks. Integrated with the bandwidth demonstration, NCDM transferred the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5 (DR5), which includes imaging data for 215 million objects between diverse geographical sites. To benefit science, the SDSS is designed to map a quarter of the sky to produce a detailed image of it and determine the positions and absolute brightness of more than 100 million celestial objects. This will ultimately provide a 3-D map depicting as many as a million galaxies and quasars. To benefit society, data is provided to others in the scientific community. "We congratulate NCDM's winning entry and are proud to once again help to deliver a speedy 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone at the Supercomputing event, achieving the fastest speeds Ethernet is capable of," said Scott Lucas, director of marketing for Extreme Networks. "Year after year, this competition illustrates the remarkable work and technology innovations happening in the scientific and network communities."