Alcatel connects teraflop computers

Alcatel has announced that its transport service switch is being used in the VIOLA (Vertically Integrated Optical test bed for Large Applications) supercomputer research network in Germany.

The VIOLA network, funded by the German Federal State secretary for Research and Education (BMBF), connects five high performance computer clusters. Together they offer an aggregated performance of more than one Teraflop of computing power - one trillion operations per second - supporting different applications and increased multi-protocol networking requirements.

Alcatel says its 1850 TSS switch was selected as it can switch any mix of circuits and packets in a flexible and robust way, and has been implemented for carrier-class Ethernet aggregation and multicast service delivery. First tests within the VIOLA lab at Sankt Augutin have proven it can work with VIOLA's existing infrastructure that consists of a multi-vendor and multi-layer, integrated optical and IP network.

'As packets and circuits are switched in their native format, the overall transport network efficiency is optimised for the bandwidth requirements of current and future applications,' said Romano Valussi, President of Alcatel's optical networking activities. 'The Alcatel 1850 TSS uses a universal matrix and locating services processing in the interface cards, effectively ensuring carrier-grade performance.'