Growing numbers of corporate research and development departments will lease time on supercomputing grids made up of clustered servers connected via optical 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, industry figures predict.

The need to store increasing quantities of information in datacentres and to access it more quickly and efficiently is also likely to accelerate the adoption of 10Gbit/s technology as a datacentre server interconnect technology over the next few years.

Force10 Networks makes a range of 10 Gigabit Ethernet-enabled switches and routers. It said it is seeing growing interest in its products from academic institutions and telecoms carriers looking either to increase hosted data and application storage capabilities, or provide the basis for powerful clustered computing environments spread across multiple sites.

"Corporate R&D departments that need a month of CPU cycles will get access to computational power through the datacentre whether from MCI or others. They don't want to own it forever, only run the computations and give it back, and they will pay top dollar for that," said Force10's vice president of marketing, Andrew Feldman.

With 10 Gigabit Ethernet optical component prices set to plummet over the next two years, the technology may also start to find its way into the corporate LAN backbones. Switches for 10Gbit/s currently cost around $12,000 to $15,000 (£6,600 to £8,200) per port, but prices should fall to $7,500 (£4,100) per port by the end of this year, according to Feldman.

While some firms with specific needs for greater computational analysis will build their own datacentres, Force10 said most are currently asking for switches with Gigabit Ethernet links that provide the option of adding 10Gbit/s modules at a later date.