Pica8, Inc., the leader in open networking software for software defined networks, today announced that its line of open fabric switches has been selected to help support several high-performance network research projects being conducted at this week’s SC12 Conference in Salt Lake City. The SCinet high-performance network infrastructure is implemented annually at the conference to serve as the network backbone for many collaborative research and education projects.

As a long-time supporter of research and education initiatives, Pica8 was selected to provide open switching solutions for the SCinet Research Sandbox at SC12 to help the research projects explore the capabilities of software defined networking (SDN) and OpenFlow. The research entities, which include universities and research organizations from around the world, required an OpenFlow-enabled switching solution that could offer greater flexibility and adaptability to dynamically perform the configurations needed to conduct experiments and interpret results.

One example was the OpenFlow Services for Science partnership project, which was designed to demonstrate data streaming over an international 10 GbE multipath, Layer 2 OpenFlow network. In this prototype, multipath TCP was used by the end hosts in Europe and North America to distribute the traffic across multiple paths, while OpenFlow was utilized to dynamically configure multiple paths between the servers used for wide-area traffic engineering.

“OpenFlow is a key technology that has the potential to greatly improve applications in high-performance computing environments,” says Steve Garrison, vice president of product marketing, Pica8. “The hardware independence of Pica8 open switches resonates with these research groups who understand that true SDN will help to optimize and customize deployments on the fly. What they learn will go a long way to accelerate overall OpenFlow development and deployments.”

About Pica8, Inc.

Pica8 is fulfilling the promise of true software defined networking (SDN) by providing the world’s first open, hardware-independent switching operating system. Pica8 solutions completely transform the data center by decoupling hardware from software. This new approach provides greater flexibility and adaptability, all while driving down implementation- and management-related costs of cloud and virtualized applications. For more information, visit www.pica8.com.