Sandia buys switches for supercomputer

Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, is adding power to its Red Storm supercomputer by installing a set of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches.

The switches, from Foundry Networks Inc., provide the core networking fabric for Red Storm, which is part of the NNSA's Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative. The computer, which can perform about 40 trillion calculations per second at peak performance, will help monitor the nation's nuclear stockpile. NNSA officials expect to start using Red Storm sometime in the next year.

The Foundry BigIron MG8 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches will form the backbone that connects the Red Storm system to resources such as a new visualization cluster for 3D modeling, according to Sandia officials.

"The Red Storm supercomputer required a high-performance networking solution," said Leonard Stans, the Sandia manager responsible for the acquisition. "It was important to Sandia to choose an optimized high performance networking solution to achieve our performance goals."