With parallel processing and chip multithreading (CMT) technologies becoming more pervasive, high-performance applications are more dependent on I/O throughput and memory latency for performance gains. Sun's dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology is designed to help accelerate application performance by optimizing I/O throughput within environments that utilize parallel threads. Based on Sun's innovative multithreaded ASIC and Throughput Networking software, Sun Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber XFP Networking Cards can provide the critical bandwidth and granular resource allocation required for parallel applications and high-speed networks.Sun dual-port 10 GbE networking cards extend CPU and OS parallelism to networking with their support for hardware-based flow classification and multiple DMAs. Using CPU thread affinity to bind a given flow to a specific CPU thread, they help enable a one-to-one correlation of RX and TX packets across the same TCP connection. This can help avoid cross-calls and context switching to deliver greater performance while reducing the need for CPU resources to support I/O processing.The networking cards also make it easier to optimize and customize resources for applications, services, and users. Their load balancing and granular resource control features enable incoming packets to be assigned to specific CPU threads or balanced across L1, L2, L3, and L4. This offers a high level of flexibility and granularity for assigning resources and can help avoid I/O bottlenecks.