Cisco to Demonstrate Broad Range of High Performance Computing Technology at SC06 Super Computing Conference

TAMPA, FL -- (MARKET WIRE) -- November 14, 2006 -- (SC06 International Conference) -- Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today that it will be demonstrating the industry's broadest range of customer choice in High Performance Computing (HPC) server interconnect technology. The Cisco family of high performance server switching products offers best-in-class scalability, high availability, and security, with common management tools, common configuration interfaces, and a common virtualization provisioning platform designed to provide comprehensive and consistent management regardless of the protocol used.

"We are seeing continued adoption of highly distributed architectures to support compute intensive applications, not only within the HPC market, but within certain segments of enterprise data centers as well," said Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager of IDC's Enterprise Computing practice. "Given the extraordinary demands of High Performance Computing, scalability, troubleshooting, and common management across multiple switching technologies are important customer requirements."

The Cisco technology portfolio includes a comprehensive line of Ethernet, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel switches offering high availability, a common look-and-feel, and common best-in-class management features. Cisco Ethernet and InfiniBand server connectivity solutions for HPC environments support five of the world's ten largest HPC clusters. Cisco offers high density, modular Ethernet switching chassis, including newly released 10 gigabits per second Ethernet switching line cards, a full line of Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand server switching chassis, and embedded Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand switching modules for blades blade servers. Designed for demanding high performance computing environments where rapid cluster start-up and comprehensive diagnostic capabilities are critical, Cisco SFS Subnet Manager is proven to scale beyond 4000 server nodes, has full database synchronization with redundant subnet managers, and is able to bring a multi-thousand-node InfiniBand cluster fabric up in less than one minute. For virtualization and dynamic resource provisioning Cisco offers VFrame, which is available today for InfiniBand fabrics.

The Cisco family of high performance computing products supports some of the world's largest server clusters, including Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force Research Laboratory Maui High Performance Computing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, the University of Sherbrooke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the University of Oklahoma. Additionally, Cisco technology has been deployed in hundreds of server clusters, including both research and commercial environments in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

"InfiniBand switches play an important role in our compute model and helped us achieve very scalable results with computational fluid dynamics and other simulation codes," said Steve Jones, founder of the Stanford University High Performance Computing Center and HPC manager for flow physics and computational engineering. "Just as important, we've had no failures that require restarts of applications. When codes can take more than a week to run, it's imperative that we provide cluster solutions with the best possible sustained uptimes."

Cisco Server Fabric Switch 7000 Series InfiniBand switching products offer cost effective, low latency options for high performance, computation intensive applications where every microsecond of latency improvement is important to accelerate the job run completion.

Cisco has also developed unique form factors of Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel storage switches for the high performance blade server market. Customers who choose blade servers as their preferred server chassis can take advantage of Cisco switching technologies by selecting server switching line cards from all the leading blade server vendors. Customers can rely on support from Cisco when connecting switching blades to Cisco modular fabric switches within the data center.

To provide common administration, troubleshooting, and security best practices, Cisco has integrated its high performance Ethernet and InfiniBand product offerings together with common management tools. These common management tools are included in the CiscoWorks umbrella. Applications include Resource Manager Essentials, Device Fault Manager and Network Connectivity Monitor (NCM).

Cisco HPC solutions will be demonstrated at SC06 in Booth 1035, including demonstrations of InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions, managing an HPC heterogeneous storage environment with Cisco Fibre Channel storage networking switches, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server support, cluster connectivity with Obsidian Longbow Campus devices to extend a standard InfiniBand link up to 10 kilometers, and the use of open source with OpenFabrics and Open MPI.

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