Several large Ethernet players, including Intel Corp. and Broadcom Corp., have sampled 1-Gbit TCP offload engines, but Chelsio claims an additional benefit besides a 10x speed advantage. Chief technology officer Asgeir Eiriksson said that no aggregated RISC engines are used in the architecture. Instead, Terminator is based on a very long instruction word architecture in which no data is cached. Control plane CPUs hence show very low utilization rates when used with the T110 host bus adapter (less than 50 percent with a 2.2-GHz uniprocessing Opteron, less than 15 percent with a 1.5-GHz uniprocessor Itanium).
The board can achieve 7.8 Gbits/s when standard Ethernet frames are used, and it also supports the Jumbo Frames format. Eiriksson said the Terminator architecture allows better scaling at both the low and high ends. Multiple RISC engines can only obtain full wire-speed performance when 10 channels are used. The Chelsio board can achieve full speed with as few as two channels, but it does not run into cache thrashing when multiple channels are used, the company said.
At the Grid Today conference, Chelsio will demonstrate 7.8-Gbit/s performance with 9.5-microseconds application latency over Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Integrity and Opteron servers connected via a Fujitsu switch with fiber and copper interconnect.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
