The Fibre Channel Systems Initiative of Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to set standards for future super-high-speed computer-to-computer and computer-to-peripherals interconnects, has now rallied some 20 organisations to form the Fibre Channel Association to promote Fibre Channel technology.Fibre Channel is designed to transmit large data files bi-directionally at 1Gbps and the association will seek to accelerate its use in future products and services. The partners stress that Fibre Channel is complementary to rather than competitive with other interconnect technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The Association offers applicants a variety of membership options ranging from Educational to Principal Membership. Membership fees range from $250 to $5,000 a year. Meantime the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative has announced the first prototype implementation of the new technology, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, the test site for interoperability for the Inititative. Livermore will use the technology in complex computer simulations of occurences such as fusion experiments, where simulations are so complex that often a supercomputer cannot complete them without first having a physicist manipulate the model on a workstation. This requires some 160Mb of data to be transferred from a supercomputer to a workstation for manual correction and then sent back to the supercomputer for completion. This process takes up to 40 minutes using an Ethernet connection, but with the prototype Fibre Channel interconnect it will take eight minutes, and with full 1Gbps interconnect available in the near future, it will come down to two seconds.
