“Essential Communications, a leading supplier of high speed
networking products, today announced the availability of a Linux
driver for its PCI host bus adapter based on the High Performance
Parallel Interface (HIPPI 800) standard.”
“The new software driver, based on the Linux operating system,
allows for the inclusion of low-cost Linux platforms within HIPPI
networks. This driver extends the HIPPI 800 network advantages
of very high speed (800 Megabits / second) data file transfer
capability and low CPU utilization to Linux platforms. Users
will now have Linux platform connectivity to high performance
computing resources that utilize HIPPI technology such as storage
area networks (SANs) and high performance server farms.”
“We’re using the Linux HIPPI driver in our dedicated PC Linux
tape servers to run most of the tape drives in the CERN Computer
Centre,” said Jes Sorensen, high performance network specialist at
CERN. “We expected significant performance improvements, but the
results were even better than we had anticipated. We are able to
run our tape drives at full speed and transport server data over
the network at around 40 Megabytes / second.”