Chelsio Communications, Inc., the established leader in 10-Gigabit Ethernet server, storage and protocol acceleration technology, today announced its second generation 10GbE TOE adapter with copper CX4 interfaces, the T210-CX, featuring industry leading performance verified in independent testing and priced at $795 in volume. With this price breakthrough, Chelsio is delivering high performance Ethernet interconnect at a price and performance comparable to Infiniband, while leveraging the ubiquitous infrastructure, ecosystem and knowledgebase of Ethernet to reduce the total cost of ownership of cluster interconnects in high performance computing (HPC) and data center applications. Sandia National Laboratories, in a paper presented on July 27th at the Cluster Symposium 2005, reported that 10GbE with TCP offload greatly improved system performance in a study where they measured aggregate bandwidth using the TerraGRID parallel filesystem. Sandia tested the system performance using both Infiniband and 10GbE with TOE as the interconnect technologies. The benchmarks, collected using a cluster interconnected with Chelsio T210 10GbE TOE adapters and a Fujitsu XG600 switch, confirmed earlier results by Ohio State University and Los Alamos National Laboratory teams. "Chelsio's 10Gb Ethernet adapters with TOE performed exceedingly well for existing socket applications in our test environment," said Helen Chen, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in the Scalable and High Performance Computing Department at Sandia National Laboratories. "TCP offload delivers outstanding performance for iSCSI-based block-level I/O clusters using standard 1500-byte frames." The Sandia paper, titled "Infiniband and 10-Gigabit Ethernet for I/O in Cluster Computing," is available for download from both Sandia National Laboratories http://fc14.ca.sandia.gov/pub/Cluster2005.pdf and Chelsio Communications: www.chelsio.com/technology/wp.htm#perf . Chelsio's T210 10GbE TOE adapters offload the CPU-intensive network protocol stack, returning precious CPU cycles to the application to enable superior performance. They have been independently verified to deliver 7.9 Gbps throughput while using only 50% of a single server CPU, double the performance and up to seven times more efficient than competing 10GbE NICs without TOE. Further benchmarks have shown that for iSCSI applications, Chelsio's adapters deliver four times the performance, at 1/4th the CPU utilization relative to basic NICs. "By consistently outperforming Infiniband while achieving a wide-adoption price point, 10GbE with TOE has just reached a new milestone on its inevitable march to become the choice for fabric convergence," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. "Chelsio will continue to halve prices every 12 months while adding new offloaded protocols to enable fabric convergence at all price points using standard 1500-byte Ethernet frames." Chelsio has partnered with Fujitsu to ensure interoperability of its TOE adapters with Fujitsu's XG Series 10Gb Ethernet switches, and the companies are working together on joint sales and marketing of both their fiber optic and copper interface products. "Fujitsu is excited about the introduction of Chelsio's T210-CX TOE adapter and sees it as a strong addition to their high performance 10Gb Ethernet product offerings," said Joel Hagberg, vice president, marketing and business development, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. "The combination of Fujitsu's XG Series 10Gb Ethernet switches with Chelsio's T210 TOE adapters will deliver industry leading performance for next generation networking applications." Chelsio will be demonstrating its T210-CX adapter at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco August 8-11. Chelsio is located in booth #256.