Cards secure conference communications

Intrusion detection and prevention PCI cards feature in SCinet - the massive network supporting the 2005 International Conference for High Performance Computing and Communications.

Metanetworks Technologies' MTP-10G and MTP-2G intrusion detection and prevention PCI cards feature in SCinet - the massive network supporting the 2005 International Conference for High Performance Computing and Communications (SC05).

Selected for their wire-speed performance on Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the MTP cards will be used as key components for accelerating SCinet's network security and monitoring infrastructure at SC05.

SCinet will deliver over 500Gbit/s aggregate WAN transport to show exhibitors.

It is expected to supply more than 50 10Gbit/s links with 15 to 18 10Gbit/s links to be used simultaneously by some participants.

To maximise performance, there will be no firewalls.

In this regard, SCinet is a temporary extension of the open Internet and is subject to cyber attacks.

The SCinet environment is especially challenging from a network security and monitoring prospective both for its extreme speed and openness.

The MTP-10G and MTP-2G cards are particularly suited for SCinet's demanding environment.

These versatile PCI cards forward 10 and 1 Gigabit traffic between their two Ethernet ports with approximately 1us latency while performing wire-speed, stateful, packet inspection.

When determining whether to capture or block packets, the cards can apply hundreds of stateful policies per packet.

Users can install up to six cards in a single host, resulting in an unprecedented total IDS/IPS capacity of up to 60 Gbit/s per machine (at least 10 times greater than any existing IDS or IPS).

The MTP-10G and MTP-2G cards support existing, open-source network security and monitoring applications.

They accomplish this by specifying capture and filtering policies using public-domain IDS signatures or standard network monitoring libraries.

The powerful yet flexible MTP application program interface (API) allows network security professionals to create custom security and monitoring applications that go beyond a pure signature-based approach.

The MTP-10G and MTP-2G cards interface with the host operating system as standard NICs and can seamlessly run a variety of standard application software at much faster speeds.

For example, open-source Snort IDS software can monitor a few hundred megabits of traffic with a standard NIC.

With the MTP-10G card, Snort can sustain monitoring 10Gbit/s of traffic without modification, a capability many times greater than any existing IDS or IPS.

The MTP-10G and MTP-2G cards are also compatible with other popular LIBPCAP-based network monitoring applications such as TCPDUMP.

SC05, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, runs until 18th November 2005 in Seattle.

Under the theme "Gateway to discovery", SC05 showcases how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce.

As the network for SC05, SCinet pushes the limit in bandwidth each year and is the world's fastest network for the duration of the show.

ACM and IEEE Computer Society are the SC05 conference series sponsors.

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