Chelsio Debuts 10-GigE Adapter

Emerging from stealth after three years, Chelsio Communications Inc.

will use next week's Gt04supercomputing conference in Philadelphia to showcase its first product -- a high-speed host bus adapter.

Chelsio received its first round of funding in 2001, and is backed by venture capitalists Sequoia Capital, Global Catalyst Partners, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Pacesetter Capital Group, and Horizon Ventures.

Chelsio was founded by Kianoosh Nagshineh, former CEO and President of ASIC Designers Inc. Prior to that, he was one of the primary architects of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI)'s (NYSE: SGI) Origin supercomputer. With $30 million of funding to date and around 40 employees, the firm is now giving us a glimpse of its wares.

The company will be demonstrating its 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter card -- the T110. Essentially, this is a 10-Gig Ethernet TCP (Transport Control Protocol) offload engine designed to reduce the strain on firms’ server processors. The device, which can also handle iSCSI, can be plugged into servers and storage devices.

Without an offload engine, server processors are struggling to meet the demands of increasingly high-speed networks, warns Nagshineh. He says, “Processors can’t cope with the demand -- now the market is getting faster and processors are not keeping up.”The TOE, as it is more commonly known, is not a new piece of technology, but mixing it with high-speed 10-Gigabit Ethernet is, says Wu Feng, team leader in research and development at Los Alamos National Laboratory, no less.

“Chelsio is one of the first to put an offload processor on a 10-Gigabit Ethernet card,” he says.

Feng knows a thing or two about the T110: He spent nearly two months testing it earlier this year. And the verdict? “We were getting higher throughputs with this 10-Gigabit Ethernet card, and lower latencies."

But Chelsio is not the only startup with aspirations in this space. Cupertino, Calif.-based S2io Technologies Corp. unveiled its Xframe offering, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X adapter, at the Gartner ITxpo event last October.

In its demo at the show, Chelsio plans to transmit standard 1500-Byte Ethernet frames in a peer-to-peer configuration at a throughput of 7.8 Gbit/s. Executives from the Sunnyvale, Calif-based firm say that this will use only half the capacity of a 2.2GHz AMD Opteron processor being used in the test.And it’s no coincidence that the company has chosen to come out of stealth at Gt'04. “The immediate market that we’re going after is high performance computing," says Nagshineh, "where they have a need for high bandwidth and low latency.”

But there is still a degree of uncertainty about the industry’s takeup of the technology. “The question is whether there is enough of a market for these things," says Feng. "But I suspect that there will be, in high-performance computing, multimedia, the entertainment and gaming industries.”

And what of the future? Unsurprisingly, Chelsio is not giving too much away, but the company promises that new product announcements, partnerships, and customers will be announced towards the end of the next quarter.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum