Sun touts multi-threading-capable networks

Santa Clara (CA) - Following multi-core processors that are able to process multiple application threads simultaneously, Sun today announced its multithreaded 10 Gig E networking technology that can take advantage of parallel threads and improve network performance.

According to the company, the new networking approach leverages employing multiple DMA channels to reduce the need for CPU resources for I/O processing. Sun claims that its multi-threaded technology is first to actually communicate with individual cores of a processor, enabling a network to channel individual threads.

The technology is able to provide a performance increase of 4x over Sun’s current networking interfaces, the firm said.

The first product to integrate the technology is Sun’ Multithreaded Networking Card, which promises to accelerate network traffic by up to 10x at on third of the cost, when compared to the equivalent number of 1 Gb Ethernet devices. Because of dual 10 GB Ethernet ports, Sun says the card can deliver a "true" line-rate of 10 Gb when used with a multi-core processor-based server.

At this time, the $500 card supports Sun’s T1-processor-based T1000, T2000 and Netra T2000 servers as well as the UltraSparc IIIi server models V215, V245 as well as V445. According to Sun, operating system support is currently limited to Solaris Sparc and X86 versions, Red Hat Linux (RH4 U3 and U4, 64-bit) as well Suse Linux 10 64-bit. Support for Suse Linux 9 64-bit, VMWare and Windows 2003 server is planned to be available in the future.