A number of companies are lining up to support a proposed industry standard in the fast growing world of high speed communication links. High Speed Channel is an 800Mbits-per second operating protocol on a copper cable connection of up to 75 feet, and is expected to be supported by the leading players, including Scientific Computer Systems Corp, San Diego, California, Ultra Network Technologies, San Jose, California, IBM, DEC and Cray Research. An ANSI standard, the Fibre Digital Data Interface, has recently been introduced operating at 100Mbps, but is described as too little too late by Scientific Computers. The high speed communications market has begun to take off, with companies offering network solutions to the data transfer bottlenecks confronting supercomputers and minisupercomputers. Faster local area networks are needed by supercomputers because, over the last decade, CPU processing speed has dramatically outstripped the ability of computers to transfer the information processed. The increasing use of powerful real-time technical and graphics workstations distributed over a network means that millions of bytes are being dumped onto networks, and there is a growing requirement for users to share multiple resources from any node on the network. Operating systems increasingly support distributed computing capabilities, which means that a user executing a complex application will spend a lot of time just reaching across the network to access a special purpose processor or remotely-stored data. The major bottleneck isn’t the speed of the data link, but the way in which protocols are processed. Instead of getting data on the network as fast as possible, traditional networks stop the data at various points to translate protocols. Ethernet, for example, delivers only about 20% of its data link speed to the application user, which represents less than 5% of a typical workstation’s throughput capacity. Network Systems Corp’s Hyperchannel, which operates at up to 100 Mbps, was regarded as the fast communications link up until this year, but has now been superseded by Scientific’s Vectornet, running at 1.4Gbps, Ultra’s UltraNet, 1Gbps, and Cray Research’s HSX at 800Mbps. Both Ultra and Scientific are understood to be working on interfaces to the proposed High Speed Channel standard from their respective proprietary high speed networks. Currently rated at 800Mbps, High Speed Channel is expected to be extended to 1.6Gbps in the future.
