High Performance Networking Forum Elects New Board, Sets New Direction

SAN JOSE, CA  January 19, 1998 - Amidst the backdrop of SC'97, the computer industry's high performance convention and exposition, the Annual Meeting of the High-Performance Networking Forum (HNF) was held.  Representatives
of major platform, storage, and data communications companies as well as government organizations doing leading edge computing, met to discuss promotion of emerging networking standards and to undertake the group's regular business.

Due to the dramatically increased interest in the technology to move gigabytes of information per second within clusters of systems and peripherals, the HNF voted to expand its board of directors from seven to nine members.

Mike Chastain of Hewlett-Packard, Jan Hauser of Sun Microsystems, Michael McGowen of Essential Communications, Carl Pick of GENROCO, Roger Ronald of Raytheon/E-Systems, and Bob Willard of Digital Equipment Corporation were elected by the membership to join Kon Leong of Gigalabs, Arie Van Praag of CERN, and Don Tolmie of Los Almos National Labs, who remain on the board.  Carl Pick was appointed Chairman and Marketing Director.  Don Tolmie will continue as Technical Director.

The HNF, formerly known as the HIPPI Networking Forum, is focusing its efforts on expanding acceptance of Gigabyte Systems Network (GSN, aka HIPPI-6400 and "SuperHIPPI") as THE standard for ultra high speed LAN
implementation of the future.  In addition to the traditional specialized government and scientific users who have required extremely fast networking and storage, commercial markets such as video on demand, data mining, and simulation modeling will be targeted by the HNF for indoctrination. The HNF will also work with other industry groups to promote GSN as a backbone for heterogeneous traffic, including ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, HIPPI, DVB, and other protocols.

At SC'97, Hewlett-Packard and Digital joined Silicon Graphics as system vendors having announced the intention to include GSN in future platforms.  Essential Communications unveiled details of the Raytheon/E-Systems 32x32 GSN switch
it will market, and GENROCO presented specifications for forthcoming 64 bit PCI GSN adapters.  Other companies, such as ImpactData and MaxStrat articulated plans to use GSN in future peripherals.  Silicon Graphics, the first producer of GSN ASICs, announced the receipt of initial prototype chips during SC'97. The new high performance network chip, known as "SuMAC", is currently being qualified by Silicon Graphics and Raytheon, and is expected to be commercially available within the next few months.

For more information about HNF and GSN, see http://www.hnf.org