Obsidian Strategics and Singapore’s A*STAR Computational Resource Centre are pioneering long-distance, 100G InfiniBand as a means of interconnecting geographically distributed supercomputers. A demonstration planned for this week’s SC14 conference in New Orleans aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using the technology for global supercomputer collaboration. The key is to transmit RDMA over transcontinental distances.
The demo will show real time analysis and control of a plasma physics experiment at the Tokyo Institute of Technology involving distributed data processing concurrently occurring in Singapore, Georgia Tech and equipment on the SC14 exhibition floor. Tata Communications is providing the long-haul cable.
Obsidian Strategics is a privately-held company based in Canada that offers InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption. Obsidian’s Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric — normally a short-range network (up to 17m) used in supercomputers and data centers — to be securely extended via optical fiber over global distances. Obsidian also provides its Crossbow technology that enables very high performance routing of InfiniBand traffic between many separate subnets.
“Supercomputers have played crucial roles in military, higher-education, R&D labs and industry for decades. Today, at the rate data usage is increasing, the uses for high performance computing have also increased. Most supercomputers today are built around a very capable open-standard LAN technology called InfiniBand, but this is limited to very short reach connections. Our work on mission critical global communication requirements from the U.S. government has allowed us to pioneer the technology capable of transparently extending InfiniBand over arbitrary distances. The result is a highly deployable communications fabric suitable for demanding applications in not only scientific computing, but also storage, data center, cloud and enterprise environments. We couldn’t be more pleased to be a part of this groundbreaking collaboration,” stated. Dr. David Southwell, co-founder and chief visionary officer, Obsidian Strategics.
The InfiniCortex demostration is at SC14 booth #548 booth #2520.
