Ultra Network Technologies

Ultra Network Technologies (previously called Ultra Corporation) is a now defunct networking company. It offered high-speed network products for the scientific computing market as well as some commercial companies. It was founded in 1986 by James N. Perdue (formerly of NASA, Ames Research Center), Drew Berding, and Wes Meador (of Control Data Corporation) to provide higher speed connectivity and networking for supercomputers and their peripherals and workstations. At the time, the only other companies offering high speed networking and connectivity for the supercomputer and high-end workstation market was Network Systems Corporation (NSC) and Computer Network Technology Corporation (CNT). They both offered 50 megabytes per second (MB/s) bandwidth between controllers but at that time, their architecture was not implemented using standard networking protocols and their applications were generally focused on supporting connectivity at high speed between large mainframes and peripherals, often only implementing only point-to-point connections. Ethernet was available in 1986 and was used by most computer centers for general networking purposes. Its bandwidth was not high enough to manage the high data rate required by the 100 MB/s supercomputer channels and 4 MB/s VMEbus channels on workstations.

Ultra's first customer, Apple Computer, purchased a system to connect their Cray 1 supercomputer to a high speed graphics framebuffer so that Apple could simulate new personal computers on the Cray Research computer (at the hardware level) and use the framebuffer as the simulated computer display device. Although not a networking application, this first contract allowed Ultra to demonstrate the basic technologies and gave them capital to continue development on a true networking processor.

In 1988, Ultra introduced ISO TP4 (level 4 networking protocol) as part of their controllers and implemented a type of star configuration network using coax and fiber optic connections. They called this product, UltraNet. They later offered a fast version of TCP/IP in their controllers, as this protocol was most frequently encountered in an actual computer center network environment. The clock rates on the Ultra network processors provided 250 Mbit/s transfer rates and four of these could be connected together to achieve one gigabit per second transfer rates for a single logical connection. Effective transfer rates between Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems workstations exceeded 4 MB/s using one 250 Mbit/s physical connection, a factor of over 10 to 12 greater than then current Ethernet connections and often exceeded the effective transfer rates of the competing NSC and CNT connections in similar applications. Customers with dual Cray computers measured the connections between Cray processors over the UltraNet that exceeded 80 MB/s effective transfer rates.